FY23 Maryland SJS Program

The Maryland SAC (MSAC) is applying for four projects: three within the Core Capacity-Building program area, including two that fit under “other capacity-building projects identified by the SAC” and one that fits under “collecting and analyzing data on criminal justice system processes;” and one Special-Emphasis Capacity-Building project aimed towards the “use of administrative or operational criminal justice data.” MSAC proposes to implement a police training, recruitment, and accountability project designed to inform decision-making, assess statewide progress in those areas, and increase transparency for agencies and the public. To achieve this, MSAC will request data from and survey Maryland’s law enforcement agencies and training academies. The data will be cleaned, collated, and analyzed, resulting in an interactive dashboard to provide the above-described goals. MSAC also proposes to analyze drug data from both toxicology reports and forensic analysis of seized drugs. To obtain data, MSAC will request data from Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. The data will be cleaned, collated, and analyzed, resulting in an interactive dashboard that will be available to key stakeholders through a secure portal for investigative purposes. MSAC is applying for a continuation of the Client Legal Utility Engine Project, retitled as the Case Harvester Data Analysis Project. This project will include court cases from 1975 through 2022 to analyze prosecution rates, sentencing trends, court ordered restitution, and impacts of COVID-19 on court trends. In addition to the Core Capacity-Building projects, MSAC is proposing a Special-Emphasis Capacity-Building project to perform a targeted research project on a new data management system for the state. The project will entail oversight of the expansion of the data management system, to include the already targeted data relating to mandated legislative reports as well as the addition of other criminal justice data, and a systematic data quality assessment to assess the performance of the new system relative to past reporting methods.