Minnesota Statistical Analysis Center, 2019

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 SAC, housed within the MN Department of Public Safety (MNDPS), will use SJS funds to support one core capacity project (NIBRS Assessment) and one special emphasis project (Juvenile Justice System Study).

For the NIBRS Assessment project, the SAC will conduct a quality assessment of the state’s NIBRS data. MN is currently in the process of rolling out a NIBRS-compatible system, and an increasing number of agencies have fully implemented the new incident-based system, including agencies that serve the two most populous counties in the state. This project will examine the quality of the data coming out of NIBRS-compliant reporting agencies by using data quality analysis tools made available by JRSA’s Incident-Based Reporting Resource Center. Given the new data elements available to the state, the SAC will also generate descriptive reports based on the data that will be of interest to the law enforcement community and the public at large. Project activities include: requesting data from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehensive (BCA); reviewing incident-based data quality strategies; reviewing and assessing the data from BCA; communicating quality assessment findings to agencies; developing descriptive reports of the incident-based data; and finalize reports.

For the Juvenile Justice System Study project, SAC will examine racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. The SAC is currently responsible for collecting federally-mandated disproportionate minority contact (DMC) with the juvenile justice system data. These data are collected annually from 15 different state and local agencies and submitted to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, as well as Minnesota’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee. The statistics generated from these data are not widely known by stakeholders within the criminal justice community nor by the public. This report will provide a thorough analysis of 12 years of data, as well as factors contributing to any observed trends. Project activities include: assembling 12 years of DMC data; analyzing assembled data to create trend analyses; finalizing methodology and data analysis strategy; consulting with juvenile justice stakeholders; finalizing report.

(CA/NCF)