Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2010, $68,220)
The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.
Under this award, the Florida SAC (FSAC) will continue its efforts to analyze the state's criminal history records and apply the Records Quality Index (RQI) methods to measure and explain Florida's record improvement. This project will focus on the customization and application of measures used to quantify the timeliness of case processing and the completeness of disposition reporting to conduct micro level analyses on the state's Computerized Criminal History (CCH) record data for three time periods: 2001-2003; 2004-2006; and 2007-2009. Specifically, the FSAC will use the timeliness and completeness RQI factors to measure the quality of the state's criminal history records systems overall and address particular areas of interest, including adult felony records which are the focus of current state performance measures. Distinct crime categories of specific interest for decisions related to firearms, such as misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence and non-felony drug violations, will also be examined. The comparison will describe the progress in the timeliness and completeness of records stored within the CCH files from one time period to the next for each factor. The findings will be used to identify areas where targeted data quality efforts can improve the overall performance of Florida's RQI. Additionally, the project will include a county-level analysis focusing on the RQI factors across each year in the cohort. The resulting analysis will assist in identifying specific counties with data quality or timeliness issues.
CA/NCF