Ohio Statistical Analysis Center

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 Ohio Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) is placed within the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services (OCJS). The SAC is also the Policy and Research arm of OCJS. OCJS is the lead criminal justice planning and assistance agency for Ohio. Although housed within the Ohio Department of Public Safety, OCJS is by constitution and statute separate from enforcement, courts, and corrections, providing a neutral criminal justice branch within state government.

Under the 2017 SJS program, the SAC will be conducting these Core Capacity Building projects.

Topic Area (A) – Carrying out research and analyses using incident-based crime data. The SAC will conduct a project that provides a better understanding of the quality of data that is submitted by local law enforcement agencies in Ohio Incident Based Reporting System (OIBRS). The SAC believes that if there are systematic concerns that come to light, the information that is gained will assist in informing technical assistance guidelines and provide insight on the potential for automated reasonableness checks within the reporting system.

Topic Area (C) – Increasing access to statistical data. The SAC will continue efforts of their 2016 SJS project in which they were transitioning the data in the Ohio Data Dashboard from InstantAtlas to Tableau. Transition from InstantAtlas will be taking place beginning in April and the SAC plans to continue updating and adding resources to the Ohio Data Dashboard in order to allow constituents to access statistical data easily. In 2016, the SAC conducted a test to determine the feasibility of creating a set of data reporting templates on specific crimes that were established from the Weave implementation. These online reporting dashboards would provide users with relevant data on a given topic that users could customize and access with minimal effort. Under this award, the SAC will continue efforts to fully implement a data reporting template.

Topic Area (D) – Other capacity-building project identified by the SAC. The SAC will conduct a prostitution-related offense trend analysis. In 2012, Ohio’s state laws were updated to increase awareness, prevention, and prosecution of human trafficking throughout the state. As defined by federal law under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, severe forms of trafficking in persons entails two types of trafficking: 1) Sex trafficking - Trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years old. 2) Service and Labor Trafficking - Trafficking in which a person is recruited, harbored, transported, provisioned or obtained for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. Ohio law addressing human trafficking is similar to federal law, but entails a tiered definition of sex trafficking based on age and considerations for individuals with developmental disabilities. (CA/NCF)

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