Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics (2009) / Chapter Skim
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4 State and Local Partnerships
4 State and Local Partnerships
Pages 165-208
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From page 165... ...
Most crime is pinpointed geographically, and much of the response to crime is handled by police, courts, and correctional facilities at the state, county, and municipal levels. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
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From page 166... ...
-- and directly compare BJS's work with the states to the models of federal-state cooperation in other parts of the federal statistical system. We then turn to BJS's principal grant program, the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP; Section 4–B)
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From page 167... ...
Ten states established SACs or designated existing agencies in SACs in 1972; by 1976, the SAC network had grown to 34 states and a nonprofit association -- the Criminal Justice Statistics Association -- developed to support and coordinate SAC activities. In 1991, the association renamed itself the Justice Research and Statistics Association (JRSA)
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From page 168... ...
State Justice Statistics Program, as does JRSA; some SACs receive additional funding from their state governments. JRSA is a nonprofit organization of SAC directors that provides a central staff and coordination effort for SAC activities; it hosts an annual research conference (with BJS funding)
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From page 169... ...
a national issue. States continue to assist BJS as a liaison for data collection efforts, enhancing state and local analytical efforts and analyses which demonstrate the utility of various systems (e.g., National Incident-Based Reporting System, criminal history records etc.)
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From page 170... ...
Funds may be requested to establish the technical capacity to conduct criminal history records-based re search. The application must either state that the applicant is also the State's administrator of [National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP)
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From page 171... ...
SJS funds may be used by the SAC to support research examining another theme or topic provided the application is accompanied by persuasive documentation and justification that the subject is a top priority for the State's Governor or criminal justice policy officials. SOURCE: Excerpts from Bureau of Justice Statistics (2008f)
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From page 172... ...
Hence, the collection costs of vital statistics data are largely assumed at the state level (with some reimbursement of "the Federal share of the reasonable cost")
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From page 173... ...
The NCHIP and related grant programs provide rela 2 All states are covered by the NASS-state partnerships; however, the New England states are coordinated through a single regional office in Concord, New Hampshire.
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From page 174... ...
, but is neither as formal nor intensive as the state agricultural arrangements. In large part, the more-limited role of the SACs is dictated by basic logic and the breadth of BJS's scope: in the criminal justice arena, there is no ideal, single, state-level point of contact with which a strong data collection arrangement can be brokered, because of the differences in state justice organizations.
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From page 175... ...
. As we also discuss in Box 3-3 and Section 3–B.3, the act tasked BJS with quarterly data collection on incidents involving the death of persons while in criminal justice system physical custody.
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From page 176... ...
Through these works, BJS has the ability to subtly but directly affect the quality of the data that it receives as input to its ongoing series and the technical systems used to generate those data. Recommendation 4.1: Through its Statistical Analysis Center and State Justice Statistics programs, BJS should continue to de velop its ties with the states, and more fully exploit the potential for using states as partners in data collections.
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From page 177... ...
4–B NATIONAL CRIMINAL HISTORY IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM AND RELATED GRANT PROGRAMS 4–B.1 Background Checks and the Development of NCHIP NCHIP makes grants to states for establishment or upgrading of information systems, in response to a provision in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (P 103-159)
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From page 178... ...
is an index of criminal history records, including persons arrested for felonies and some serious misdemeanors. It is an index (including identifying in formation such as name, gender, race and ethnicity, and data of birth)
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From page 179... ...
, in conjunction with units of local government, State and local courts, other States, or combinations thereof." The intended purpose of these grant monies was to: establish or upgrade an integrated approach to develop information and identification technologies and systems to -- (1) upgrade criminal history and criminal justice record systems, in cluding systems operated by law enforcement agencies and courts; (2)
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From page 180... ...
integrated criminal justice information systems to manage and communicate criminal justice information among law enforcement agencies, courts, prosecu tors, and corrections agencies; (8) noncriminal history record information systems relevant to firearms eligibility de terminations for availability and accessibility to the national instant criminal back ground check system established under [the]
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From page 181... ...
The survey is conducted by SEARCH, the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics. BJS has issued periodic updates on progress in criminal history record improvement (e.g., Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001)
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From page 182... ...
Four years later, GAO conducted a second audit of NCHIP with , specific mandates from congressional requesters to describe Department of Justice oversight of the funds. The second review again reported significant progress in automating criminal history records; replying to a review version of the report, BJS indicated technology reporting and better case disposition reporting from court information systems as particular priorities for NCHIP work (Larence, 2008)
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. Armed with these new legal authorities, BJS began the process of negotiating access to criminal history records with the FBI.
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How ever, improved criminal history records are important for the prospects of longitudinal analysis of the criminal justice sys tem. Analysis of the National Instant Background Check System serves as one approach to provide the data necessary to evaluate national policy on regulation of firearms purchases.
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From page 185... ...
Recommendation 4.3: BJS should actively utilize the NCHIP program to improve criminal history records necessary for lon gitudinal studies of crime. It is appropriate, in this chapter on federal-state partnerships, to observe that BJS can learn from and build on work done in several of its SAC affiliates, some of which (being parts of law enforcement departments)
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From page 186... ...
Table 4-1 sum marizes further similarities and differences in coverage and content between the UCR and the NCVS. • As discussed in the preceding section, the FBI maintains and admin isters national-level criminal history record databases, such as the in stant background check database used to screen potential firearm pur chasers, through its NCIC.
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From page 187... ...
In recent years, police departments have also been required to submit quarterly reports of hate crime incidents; these reports, too, include incident-level characteristics such as the type of bias motivation. On an annual basis, agencies are asked to provide counts of the number of personnel in their employ (total and sworn officers, specifically)
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From page 188... ...
. Like the NCIC that administers the FBI's criminal history databases, the UCR program is administratively housed in the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
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that offense involved and not the other offense(s) " (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004b:10)
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From page 190... ...
Other The Uniform Crime Reporting Program Handbook (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004b) defines three major exceptions to use of this hierarchy rule for crime reporting.
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From page 191... ...
• Hate crime statistics: The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 led to the collection of a variable on "bias motivation in incidents in which the offense resulted in whole or in part because of the offender's preju dice against a race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin" (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004b:3)
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From page 192... ...
Though the Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook provides considerable detail on who should and should not be included in the count (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004b:124) , only the aggregate employee count is requested.
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From page 193... ...
. Recommendations in this Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program led to pilot work with several law enforcement agencies in South Carolina in 1987 and the presentation of the new NIBRS concepts at a national UCR conference in March 1988; the first NIBRS data were received by the FBI in January 1989, and the first NIBRS data for public use were released in 1998 (for 1996 data)
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From page 194... ...
4–C.2 BJS Role in UCR and NIBRS BJS plays no role in the collection or dissemination of UCR or NIBRS data. However, it has issued grants over the past decade to promote the transition to NIBRS reporting by law enforcement agencies (particularly those in larger states and metropolitan areas)
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From page 195... ...
summarizing BJS's final allocation formula and the amounts of money dispersed to the statements under the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant Program from 1996 to 2004. BJS was formally tasked with deriving the formula for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, the successor to the block grant program (Hickman, 2005a)
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From page 196... ...
The discussion of strategic objective IVD.1, "Expand information sharing capabilities to support customer needs," notes (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004a:98) : An array of state-of-the-art technology in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
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From page 197... ...
No No No Elderly Yes No No Timeliness of data availability Pre-announced schedule Yes Yes Yes Fixed schedule Yes Yes Yes Accuracy and quality Sampling error Routinely Unmeasured Unmeasured estimated Other errors (nonsampling) No ongoing Unknown Unknown evaluation ∗ These areas are not identified in the public use files currently available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, but are on area-identified files maintained by the Census Bureau.
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From page 198... ...
summarizes: The implementation of NIBRS by local law enforcement agencies is an evolving but slow moving process and this has had an impact on its use for research. The early NIBRS data releases (1996 through 1998)
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That August, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) convened a Violent Crime Forum of police chiefs, the result of which was a compilation of current crime data from several of the participating police departments.
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There is, moreover, a trust that may be implicit in UCR reporting relationships -- law enforcement agencies providing data to a fellow law enforcement agency -- that is nontrivial. It is certainly possible that, with strong endorsement and assistance from collaboratives such as the IACP and PERF, a transition from FBI to BJS could be successful in time, but the short-term impact on response rates could be significant.
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From page 201... ...
Timely Records-Based Collection from Local Law Enforcement Files Rather than "take over" UCR, as the option might be bluntly described, our recommendation is that BJS explore the possibility of doing something that is different from either the UCR or NCVS and that we think is better than the UCR in some respects. Specifically, we suggest that BJS work with local law enforcement agencies to develop a system under which BJS could regularly extract records from individual departments' own computer systems -- data that many departments regularly compile on their own and some departments post on their websites -- for a sample of jurisdictions.
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From page 202... ...
, while yielding detailed estimates down to the county level.13 Another example is the national Vital Statistics program administered by NCHS, which we described in Section 4–A.1. Drawing from reports from state health departments and reporting authorities, the vital statistics estimates represent a census-type measure of births in the United States.
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From page 203... ...
Such a system has two notable precursors. First, it hearkens back to the original purpose of the NIBRS program, "to take advantage of available crime data maintained in modern law enforcement records systems" (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004b:3)
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From page 204... ...
We say that our proposal is akin to but not identical to a "national COMPSTAT" in that our proposal is to generate a timely summary or index value of crime, and not a direct analysis of the geographically coded incident data that can be used to inform COMPSTAT managers' decisions to allocate personnel and resources. Valuable though such data would be, there is an inherent tension between the statistical information that an agency such as BJS can provide and the fine-grained, "tactical" assessments -- informing specific interventions and used to hold line officers and commanders accountable -- that are of particular interest to law enforcement agencies.
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From page 205... ...
Short of a complete inven tory of technical systems status (such as BJS performed for state correc tions departments and individual facilities; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1998b) or its SEARCH-conducted Survey of Criminal History Infor mation Systems (Section 4–B)
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From page 206... ...
. The second technical challenge is the resolution of the data that the local departments could, and could most feasibly, give to BJS: whether incident-level files as in existing NIBRS or aggre gate summary reports like the agencies now send to the FBI.
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From page 207... ...
; and the UCR and, particularly, the NCVS would be poised to provide richness of information on contexts and possible causes that are not possible with the interim indicators. All of this -- well-designed data systems working at multiple resolutions -- would contribute greatly to BJS's core mission to assist state and local governments and agencies.
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