FY 2017 SJS Project: Building Capacity to Assimilate New Data Collections

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 (SAC) is a unit of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). Organizationally, the SAC 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 also houses expertise in the areas of data analysis, computer technology, and data collection processes. The SAC maintains a supporting, working relationship with the State Administrating Agency (SAA). The Bureau Chief for the SAA function serves as a member of the SAC Advisory Board. The SAC's goal is to inform practitioners and policy-makers about crime, criminal offenders and crime victims in Florida. To accomplish this goal the SAC 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 SAC will implement two projects that will increase access to statistical data.

In project number one, the SAC will develop a Crime Data Conversion Tool Kit for use with two of Florida’s data sources: the UCR and the CCH files. This conversion tool kit will allow the SAC to develop a series of SAS programs and data tables that will convert crime data for use in crime trend analyses now and in preparation for Florida’s move to collecting incident-based data as part of the state’s UCR Program. The state of Florida has well established UCR division which historically has accounted for and tracked all of the summary crime reporting information for the state. This conversion data kit will work in conjunction with the state's efforts to use more incident-based information with it's summary level data and system.

In project number two, the SAC will expand data available on their website by preparing and presenting data for each of the UCR’s Part II arrest categories along with statewide CCH arrest data for the corresponding crimes. This project, which builds off of prior grant funded efforts of the state, will develop new and add historical content from Florida's UCR data series to the SAC's website. Currently, the SAC's efforts are focused on the Index crimes, but with the state's transition to collecting NIBRS-based crime data, the SAC will expand the website’s capacity by building the framework to include additional pages for offenses that only have arrest data available through the Summary-based collection. Additionally, the UCR arrests for these offenses will be compared to equivalent arrests found in Florida’s CCH files for evaluative and data quality purposes.

(CA/NCF)

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