Where and how can the NC Department of Public Safety Governor’s Crime Commission develop more rigorous research and evidence to inform statewide investments to reduce crime and improve public health?
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Project Overview
Summary
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety (NCDPS) Governor’s Crime Commission (GCC) operates the Criminal Justice Analysis Center (CJAC), established in 2018. The CJAC’s primary functions include:
- Producing data-driven research and analysis of North Carolina's criminal justice system;
- Supporting the criminal justice data needs of the GCC; and
- Development and maintenance of the NC Justice Data Portal.
GCC received a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) through the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVIPI) in 2023 with the goal to prevent and reduce violent crime in communities by supporting comprehensive, evidence-based violence intervention and prevention programs. The BJA requires grantees to identify and report performance measures related to the CVIPI activities and ultimately use the performance measures to measure the impact of those strategies funded by the CVIPI grant to reduce community violence.
Related to this effort, GCC also received a grant from the Council of State Governments Justice Center’s Justice Counts initiative. Justice Counts is a national, consensus-building initiative designed to help policymakers make better decisions with criminal justice data that’s more timely, less disjointed, and as useful as possible. The purpose of the grant from Justice Counts is to identify and obtain criminal justice metrics across disparate agencies and data sources in North Carolina to build the necessary data infrastructure and data warehouse that improves the accessibility and usability of criminal justice data for evidence-based decision making and program evaluation.
Anticipated deliverables
The GCC and the NC Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP) are partnering on this project to develop the following areas to accomplish the goals of the CVIPI and Justice Counts grants in addition to building broader capacity at GCC to generate and use data and evidence:
- A GCC research and evaluation agenda with data use cases articulating the key criminal justice, public health, and public safety policy and programmatic questions to make evidence-based decisions.
- A data landscape assessment identifying which local, state, and federal agencies maintain criminal justice, public health, and public safety outcomes that the CVIPI and Justice Counts grants require the GCC to obtain.
- Data sharing and data use agreements with local, state, and federal agencies as necessary for the GCC to obtain and analyze the criminal justice, public health, and public safety outcomes identified in the data landscape assessment and house data in GCC data warehouse.
Planned use of results
The results from this project will enable GCC CJAC to conduct analysis related to the CVIPI grant to assess the effectiveness of community violence prevention interventions implemented in North Carolina and inform broader strategies to reduce community violence. In addition, analyzing Justice Counts measures statewide and locally in North Carolina will allow data-driven policy decisions to increase public safety. The GCC Research Agenda will also provide a framework and vision for GCC's research and evidence building activities over the next two years (2025 - 2027).
Data
GCC currently receives National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data from the NC State Bureau of Investigation (NCSBI). Other data sources of interest include Jail Management Systems, calls for service involving a response by law enforcement (911), the NC Department of Adult Correction (Division of Institutions and Division of Community Supervision), law enforcement staff, court cases (filings and dispositions), defense cases (assigned and disposition), and prosecution cases (assigned and disposition). Justice Counts also requests funding data and staff levels for each of the seven sectors of the criminal justice system (law enforcement, prosecution, defense, courts/pretrial, jails, prisons, supervision). The CVIPI required data and outcome measures are available here. The required data and outcome measures for the Justice Counts grant are available here.
Project Team
NC Department of Public Safety Governor's Crime Commission Criminal Justice Analysis Center
NC Office of Strategic Partnerships