Minnesota Crime Victimization Survey

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 Minnesota Statistical Analysis Center (MNSAC) is located in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (MNDPS) Office of Justice Programs (OJP), which serves as the State Administering Agency (SAA).

Under the 2015 SJS Special Emphasis area, the MNSAC is using the funds to conduct a crime victimization survey (CVS). The goal of the CVS study is to provide Minnesota, a Uniform Crime Reporting state, with criminal victimization information beyond what is reported to police. The state does not yet have incident based reporting which results in little statewide and law enforcement information on victimization. Additionally, the information the state has does not provided a complete picture of victimization in the state because many crimes go unreported to the police. The proposed CVS will provide law enforcement, policymakers and service providers with the information they need to plan for the victimization needs as well as allow for comparison to national estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

The MNSAC, in collaboration with Wyoming SAC (WYSAC), will complete a statewide, mixed-mode (online and mail) study with an address based sampling frame. The target population for the project is adults, but to ensure enough completed surveys by Minnesota’s rapidly changing and aging population, the WYSAC will oversample minority residents and those 65 years and older. A minimum of 1000 surveys will be completed. The WYSAC (through a contractual agreement) will complete the data collection process, clean and weight the data, and provide the MNSAC with a final statistical package for the social sciences data file and methods report. The purpose of the project is to enhance the MNSAC’s capacity to provide the stakeholder groups with methodologically sound, statistically reliable victimization data that can be used in policy and planning.

CA/NCF