Increasing Availability and Access to Justice Statistics on the Website

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 Florida Statistical Analysis Center (FSAC) is a unit of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Organizationally, the FSAC is part of the Office of Planning, Policy and Data Analysis within the Division of Criminal Justice Information. This location facilitates its use of the criminal history files and other FDLE-maintained data. FDLE houses the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the Computerized Criminal History (CCH) files, the Offender-Based Tracking Statistics (OBTS) and the Automated Training Management System (ATMS) databases, among others. FDLE houses expertise in the areas of data analysis, computer technology, and data collection processes. The FSAC maintains a supporting, working relationship with the State Administrating Agency (SAA). The Bureau Chief for the SAA function serves as a member of the FSAC Advisory Board.

The FSAC's goal is to inform practitioners and policy-makers about crime, criminal offenders and crime victims in Florida. To accomplish this goal the FSAC transforms existing crime data into research data sets; identifies new data sources; and performs analysis to translate data into useful and understandable information.

Under this award, the FSAC has proposed a project to increase access to criminal justice statistical data by making information available on its website that is not currently published through online sources. The project will focus on bringing more of Florida’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data to the website, including Florida’s Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR) data and Arson data, neither of which are currently available online. The proposed project is not a supplemental project but will build on the 2014 FDLE award which developed new content for the FSAC’s website and added previously unavailable historical content from Florida’s UCR data series.

CA/NCF