2019 State Justice Statistics Program

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. This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law, and complies with Part 200 Uniform Requirements – 2CFR 200.210(a)(14).

The Alabama Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) is located within the Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) Division of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA). The SAC serves as a clearinghouse of criminal justice information and is responsible for analyzing and disseminating crime data on domestic violence, rape, juveniles, and school violence in Alabama to members of the executive, legislative and judicial departments of government, media outlets and the public.

Under this award, the Alabama SAC will conduct activities under the following Core Capacity area: Increased access to statistical data. Alabama is in the midst of a multi-year redesign and deployment of its Computerized Criminal History (CCH) system. The goal of this redesign is to improve data quality and timeliness in the system by replacing paper-based data communication with electronic data exchange, and by improving the quality of the system design and its methodology for combining disparate data sources into a single cohesive crime data record. By the end of 2019, ALEA will have completed the statewide implementation of a centralized NIBRS-compliant repository of UCR data. This has been a multi-year effort that has caused significant delays in updating ALEA’s statistical reporting capabilities and has resulted in a gap in funding requests to the SAC program.

Funds will be used to create a new reporting repository to support NIBRS-compliant incident data. The repository will house data submitted by ALEA and allow both large and small agencies to externally submit, validate, and store their data in the repository. This transition to NIBRS incident-based reporting (IBR) from all law enforcement levels in Alabama presents a significant opportunity for enhanced data analytics, reporting, and research in Alabama.

(CA/NCF)