FY 2020 Alabama 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.

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. ALEA 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. This new repository consists of data submitted by ALEA and provides software (eCrime) and an external vendor submission system that allows both large and small agencies to externally submit, validate, and store their data in the central 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. Existing reporting tools and processes are built around summary information and need to be updated to handle the new IBR NIBRS data.

Funds are being requested to continue the development of the backend IBR data processing engine (CRIBD) to handle the new incident-based data in Alabama. The primary objective of CRIBD is to integrate the new IBR data into the reporting channels of ALEA so that it can replace the existing summary-based reporting mechanisms that are currently in place.

(CA/NCF)