Resisting Arrest and Traffic Arrest Analysis

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 (FSAC) 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'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 FSAC will conduct two Special Emphasis projects: 1) Traffic-related crime and criminal history 2) An analysis of resisting arrest in Florida.

Under the traffic-related crime and criminal history project, the FSAC will evaluate traffic-related arrest events that occurred between 1999 and 2018. The FSAC will develop typologies that describe individuals with traffic-related criminal history demographically and by category of traffic crime. The study will analyze the types of crimes committed by the traffic offenders including other charges related to the same arrest event. A subset of individuals with only traffic-related crimes will also be examined. This project is also designed to measure the completeness of traffic-related criminal records and identify patterns or processes that affect the inclusion of case outcomes in the CCH data.

Under the analysis of resisting arrest in Florida project, the FSAC will use the new FBI implemented Use of Force data collection in combination with other data sources analyze the outcome of the interaction between the police and the public. Specifically, the FSAC will analyze records for resisting arrest found within Florida’s criminal history repository and use these criminal history records to advance the current understanding of suspect resistance by examining official records of arrest events. These events will focus on circumstances in which the offender resisted arrest, with or without violence, and with consideration of other charges associated with the arrest.

From this research, the FSAC expects to develop typologies of offenders charged with resisting arrest between 2009-2018 including demographic and criminal history descriptions, analysis of the types of other offenses that co-occurred, and a comparison between groups resisting arrest with violence and without violence.

(CA/NCF)