FY23 Georgia SJS Program

The Georgia Statistical Analysis Center (GASAC) proposes a three-year project under Core Capacity 1(A) to expand its use of National Incident Based Reporting for policy research and analysis. The GASAC, in partnership with Georgia State University (GSU), will conduct three-projects aimed at continuing to assess NIBRS data quality and expand understanding of law enforcement agency reporting practices. Substantively, the three projects will focus on domestic/family violence, gun crime, and sexual assault. With respect to domestic/family violence, the GASAC and GSU will conduct semi-structured interviews with law enforcement agencies to understand the use of NIBRS-compliant incident reports versus legacy UCR Family Violence Incident reports to capture domestic violence/family violence incidents. A recent quantitative analysis that GSU completed showed that only 46.8% of UCR Family Violence Incident Report numbers overlap with NIBRS incident reports. The GASAC seeks to understand how law enforcement agencies with high and low overlap rates are using these two incident data capture mechanisms to better define data quality around family violence reporting in the state. Second, the GASAC and GSU will seek to characterize gun crime throughout the state. NIBRS implementation presents the first opportunity for the state to have a rendering of gun-related crime in the state. We seek to answer where is gun crime happening, what kinds of injuries are victims experiencing, what are the clearance rates for incidents involving a gun, and what is the relationship - if any - between reporting on stolen guns and violent incidents involving a gun. Finally, the GASAC and GSU will analyze sexual assault incident clearance rates based on crime characteristics such as victim-offender relationship, use of a weapon, type of assault, and assault location. We will compare NIBRS incident numbers to incident numbers reported to the Georgia Crime Victims Compensation Program - which pays for forensic medical exams. Whether a forensic medical exam was available or conducted will also be included as a factor in our analysis. These three projects will continue building the GASAC's capacity to provide policy relevant research on timely criminal justice issues that are important to the state and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Data quality assessments at the state level will help BJS better plan its own methods for cleaning and imputing national NIBRS data.