By Kevin M. Scott, PhD
BJS Acting Director
2024, our 45th year, was a significant one for the Bureau of Justice Statistics in meeting our mission. In 2024, we:
- Launched the first redesign of the National Crime Victimization Survey in 30 years, fielding the new instrument in a split sample with the existing instrument.
- Managed four criminal justice data improvement grant programs for which staff reviewed 112 applications, with requests totaling nearly $160 million, and processed 108 awards totaling over $108.2 million.
- Published 35 statistical reports and 4 grant-funded reports, refreshed data in 6 data tools, appeared and presented at 80 public conferences and meetings, and provided assistance on criminal justice data collection and reporting to several other countries.
- Fielded the first Survey of Inmates in Local Jails since 2002 and completed administration of the first National Inmate Survey since 2012.
- Engaged with a wide array of representatives from tribal governments, tribal law enforcement agencies, and tribal court systems as part of our efforts to develop data collections that better address the needs of tribal criminal justice agencies.
- Published a report depicting key trends in firearm violence, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Published our first report on campus law enforcement agencies since 2015 and our first report on state court prosecutors since 2011.
- Convened our first Student Research Expo to highlight student projects that use BJS data sources and other select data sources.
- Hosted webinars on youth in the criminal justice system, the nation’s two crime measures, and our interactive data dashboards that facilitate access to and analysis of our datasets.
- Welcomed new members to our team, including establishing our Statistical Methods Unit.
- Continued our efforts to enhance our operational infrastructure toward greater efficiency and improvements and to leverage emerging technology to better protect the data entrusted to us.
Visit our year in review page to see other highlights. As we near the end of January, we’re already hard at work in 2025. We will continue to engage our stakeholders and draw new audiences in a variety of forums, including conducting webinars, presenting at conferences, providing technical assistance, and listening to the needs of the criminal justice community.
I’m particularly delighted to report on some of our recently completed data collections, and to be able to share the work we’ve been doing to make it easier to access our data and analyses. We will also continue to collaborate across the Department of Justice, among the federal statistical community, and with our state and federal partners to leverage data to offer insights into the criminal justice system that can inform policy discussions.
Stay tuned! We’re looking forward to hearing from you this year and are excited about what we get to share with you! If you are new to BJS content, please be sure to subscribe to JUSTSTATS, follow us on X and Facebook, and take a look at our YouTube channel for updates on all that we are doing.
We’re truly excited about what the second half of this decade has in store for us—for the data we collect, analyze, publish, and disseminate to inform criminal justice policy, and for the support we provide to improve statistical capacity for state, local, and tribal governments.