Wisconsin FY24 SJSP

The Bureau of Justice Information and Analysis (BJIA) at the Wisconsin (W) Department of Justice (DOJ) current efforts and strategic goals focus on enhancing research and data infrastructure, increasing access to critical criminal justice data sources, and expanding research and evaluation capability. In pursuit of these objectives, WI DOJ requests funds for two different projects, a core capacity project and special emphasis project. The proposed core capacity project seeks to enhance BJIA’s research infrastructure and increase access to statistical data. Firstly, this will be accomplished by exploring the feasibility of migrating WI DOJ’s instance of REDCap (a data collection and data management tool) from a locally hosted location to Amazon Web Services. Additionally, with initial infrastructure and sources in place for the BJIA’s research data warehouse, this project also seeks to expand the data sources available in the warehouse by incorporating Wisconsin Use of Force and Arrest Related Death Program (UFAD) data. To accomplish expansion, the proposed project will set up an extract, load, and transformation (ELT) process for the UFAD data and set up automated refresh schedules. The proposed special emphasis project builds on WI DOJ’s current SJS FY23 project piloting the collection and linking of Calls for Service (CFS) with data in BJIA’s research data warehouse to achieve two things: 1) assess the utility of a linked dataset with CFS and Centralized Criminal History (CCH) to assess completeness of CCH arrest events, and 2) using a combined CFS and CCH dataset to get a better picture of criminality occurring on an individual person level with the aim of developing a more complete measure of recidivism and offending. WI DOJ will test two approaches examining the utility of CFS in assessing the completeness of arrest events in CCH, one focusing on specific types of CFS records that are more likely to result in arrest and another attempting to utilize historical trends to establish patterns of arrest rates in relation to CFS incidents. The second portion of this proposed project will examine CFS data linked with CCH to establish a counting methodology to explore how a sample of CFS data intersects with CCH arrest events on an individual person level, ultimately hoping to develop a measure that better captures criminality on an individual level for use in analyzing law enforcement-led co-response program outcomes.