Enhancing Iowa's Incident-Based Reporting Capability

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.

The Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning (CJJP) located in the Department of Human Rights (DHR) is the Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) for the state of Iowa. This location helps ensure the independence of the SAC's research, planning, data coordination and information clearinghouse functions from operational justice system agencies. CJJP's enabling statute mandates the existence and oversight of an advisory council with a makeup that includes representation from all state-level justice system agencies and branches of government as well as local officials and others. Under the FY 2014 SJS award, the CJJP requests funding under the Special Emphasis Category, Area A in order to enhance its research and analytic capacities by implementing an Incident Based Uniform Crime Reporting (IBUCR) data exchange with the Iowa Department of Public Safety (DPS). The CJJP will work with DPS to extract the IBUCR data from DPS systems into the Justice Data Warehouse. This project will assist efforts to increase the completeness, accuracy and access to Iowas IBUCR. The capacity of the Iowa SAC will be enhanced by expanding its data access, in the process facilitating wider distribution and utilization of IBUCR data. In addition, CJJP will work to increase the completeness and quality of these data, thereby increasing confidence in and usability of the data. (CA/NCF)