Arizona Statistical Analysis Center Core Capacity and Special Emphasis Projects

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 AZ SAC, housed within the AZ Criminal Justice Commission (ACJC) is requesting funds to support one core capacity building project (Increasing Police Access to Data and Research) and one special emphasis project (Actual and Expected Completeness Indices for Assessing Multi-Jurisdictional Criminal History Records Quality).

Increasing Police Access to Data and Research – The basis of this project is to increase police access to data and research by building a web-based curriculum designed to introduce data, research databases, report design and grant writing to local police departments. Although a public access web-based data curriculum currently exists, the applicant believes there is a need for a law enforcement only web-based curriculum to deliver data specifically designed for law enforcement. For the design and development of the law enforcement web-based curriculum, the AZ SAC will partner with the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), the Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) office and other law enforcement stakeholders. To develop the data curriculum, the AZ SAC staff will host focus groups with law enforcement personnel that will cover a variety of themes, data needs, research staff, current capabilities, past research experiences and perspectives on using data for police practices. From the focus group feedback, the AZ SAC will build a web-based curriculum that focuses on a module that consists of four sections from the pre-test through the post-test. The sections are researching, data sources, research databases, and using data before distributing the information in various forms. The primary objective of the project is to deliver to BJS a data-based research curriculum tailored to the needs of law enforcement, which can easily be adapted to other states.

Actual and Expected Completeness Indices for Assessing Multi-Jurisdictional Criminal History Records Quality – The AZ SAC will build the creation of actual and expected records completeness indices for use by the state or local jurisdiction to calculate the improvement necessary to reach records completeness thresholds established by each state’s records time limitations. The AZ SAC has been monitoring criminal history record completeness in the state's criminal record repository. As completeness continues to improve, stakeholders will benefit from an additional index that will identify the threshold of maximum efficiency in records processing. The difference between the actual index and expected index will indicate the extent of the gap in records completeness. The AZ SAC will use random modeling techniques and leverage data from a sample of two completeness indices. The final report will outline how the AZ SAC indices translate to other states and jurisdictions with minimal effort. (CA/NCF)

Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law.