Core Capacity and Special Emphasis SAC Proposal: Michigan State University

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 designated SAC is located at the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University (MSU). The SAC works closely with the Michigan State Police (MSP) which is also the State Administering Agency (SAA).

Under the 2015 SJS Core Capacity area, the SAC will continue to focus on using National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, supplemented with other sources of data, to address criminal justice performance related to state and local priorities. The project will focus on substance abuse trends (particularly heroine and relationship to prescription drugs), multi-jurisdictional enforcement activities, and motor vehicle theft. Specifically, the substance abuse trends involves integrating NIBRS data with other sources of data (e.g. self-reported use, treatment admissions, prescription monitoring, etc.). The multi-jurisdictional enforcement activities involve research to align performance measures with the SAA strategic plan, and the motor vehicle theft study will use NIBRS data to examine statewide patterns. The data will be assessed from the perspective of formal research issues of reliability and validity, practical issues such as the availability of data (e.g., timeliness of available data to support ongoing, real-time problem analysis) and quality of data (e.g., availability of geocoded data). The data will also be assessed on the basis of law enforcement professional perspectives on the value and limitations of the data.

Under the 2015 SJS Special Emphasis area, the SAC will conduct a crime victimization survey (CVS). The CVS will focus on a local level survey to increase understanding of victimization patterns in high crime urban settings with a primary goal of understanding the methodological issues of national significance. The secondary research will compare victimization and NIBRS data to enhance the understanding of crime trends and patterns as well as to better understand reliability and validity issues associated with the CVS and NIBRS data. The CVS will include a representative sample of residents of Detroit. An address based sampling (ABS) strategy will be employed with a goal of generating a final representative sample of approximately 1,200 respondents. The project will build on lessons learned from the FY 2014 SAC survey in Saginaw and will include experiments with incentives and modalities to inform the field on cost-effective methodologies for generating representative local-level samples.

CA/NCF