Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2014, $60,000)
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 Tennessee Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) located within the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), was established by Executive Order and mandated by legislation to act as a clearinghouse for statewide criminal justice statistics and to operate the statewide Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The broad goals of the SAC are: 1) act as a central coordination point for federal support, with technical assistance available to help criminal justice agencies in the statistical analysis process; 2) coordinate the flow and exchange of information statistics for all criminal justice agencies in the state; 3) locate, utilize, and coordinate resource personnel to provide expertise to criminal justice agencies on developments in criminal justice statistics and to assist these agencies in the development of public policy; and, 4) continue to design, create, and coordinate the development and management of databases for statistical information for both state and local criminal justice agencies and policymakers to improve the decision making process.
Under this award, the Tennessee Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) will conduct activities under the following Core Capacity areas: NIBRS research and Increasing access to statistical data. Tennessee crime incident data is available via the web based TnCrimeonline.com utility. The SAC has identified needs to improve the system, including increasing the maximum data download limits for users; providing a concise single report depicting all incident information for any selected incident; and improving the data accuracy and completeness of the system by developing a more robust tracking method for data submissions. The goal of the project is to address the identified needs by contracting with the utility vendor to develop and implement the programming to address each of the needs. Tennessee Crime On-line is the primary source of crime incident data in the state and is used by policymakers, law enforcement, the general public and the media. The SAC has worked closely with the state administering agency (SAA) and other users to add data to address identified data needs during the last several years. At the conclusion of the project, users will be able to submit and receive larger data download requests in user friendly formats such as text files, excel, and pdf; obtain a single incident report with all incident information collected by the system contained on the report; and the SAC will be able to more effectively and easily monitor data levels and submissions to ensure accuracy and completeness of the data. Funding is also being requested for travel to attend the 2015 NCJA Conference where JRSA will facilitate a track for the SACs. (CA/NCF)