Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2023, $78,068)
The Bureau of Justice Information and Analysis (BJIA) at the Wisconsin (W) Department of Justice (DOJ) aims to explore the feasibility of linking statewide criminal justice data with programmatic data at the person-level and in aggregate form. The BJIA is receiving federal funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (FY-2019) (JRI-19) to develop a research-focused data warehouse linking criminal justice data from the WI centralized criminal history (CCH) database, charges and dispositions from the WI circuit courts, and admissions from the WI Department of Corrections (DOC). The goal of this proposal is to expand on the work of JRI-19 to augment the research-focused data warehouse with additional datasets from Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), Wisconsin Incident-Based Reporting System (WIBRS), Use-of-Force and Arrest-Related-Death data (UFAD), and law enforcement employee demographics and training records. Additionally, the project aims to explore the feasibility of linking a sample of Calls for Service (CFS) data and assess the geospatial utility of such linking. The first step of this proposed project is to add UCR and WIBRS program data to the research data warehouse. The second step is to add UFAD program data to the warehouse. For UFAD data, the project will test the feasibility of matching to WIBRS data by the corresponding WIBRS number reported for both programs. Next, the project will attempt to collect and securely store law enforcement employee and training data in the data warehouse. The last step is piloting the collection and linking of CFS data. Wisconsin does not have a centralized collection method for CFS data; therefore, this project will attempt to collect a sample of CFS data from select law enforcement agencies (LEA) and explore the linking capabilities of the data to the research data warehouse at the incident-level. The benefits of adding statewide UCR, WIBRS, UFAD, and sampling of CFS data to the research data warehouse include enhancing the research capacity for the WI DOJ and, ultimately, the public by making de-identified data open source.