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.
Deliverables
The GCC and the NC Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP) partnered on this project to develop the GCC Research & Evidence Building Priorities Action Plan completed in January 2025. The GCC Research & Evidence Building Priorities Action Plan articulates the key criminal justice, public health, and public safety policy and programmatic questions that GCC plans to answer through research and evaluation projects to make more evidence-based decisions. The Action Plan also includes 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.
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 & Evidence Building Priorities Action Plan will also provide a framework and vision for GCC's research and evidence building activities over the next two years (2025 - 2027).
Data
Between July and September 2024, GCC and OSP engaged key internal and externa stakeholders through virtual and in-person listening sessions and an online survey to identify research priorities.
Project Team

NC Department of Public Safety Governor's Crime Commission Criminal Justice Analysis Center

NC Office of Strategic Partnerships