The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.
The New Hampshire Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), located within the New Hampshire Department of Justice, will use SJS funds to complete the last step of a multi-year effort to develop a comprehensive National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) application to enable local law enforcement agencies to accurately map crime data within their jurisdictions. Currently, the state's repository is not able to update and employ new FBI validation errors and offense codes, including new race and ethnicity codes and offense codes for bias and human trafficking. Additional offense codes for computer hacking/invasion and identity theft are also forthcoming. As a result, the FBI has to estimate crime rates in New Hampshire and the state is not able to disseminate accurate crime data. The SAC will use SJS funds to support contractual services to build a custom repository to upgrade the referenced data points and codes and to complete the remaining steps to develop the capacity to map crime statistics by town, county, and region. This project will enable the SAC to initiate research on new offense types, including human trafficking, computer hacking, and gender/race bias crimes. Additionally, the upgrades will provide the means for the SAC to assess the effectiveness of a new proposed statewide prescription drug monitoring program. The successful completion of this multi-year effort will result in the increased accessibility and quality of NIBRS data and will improve the SAC's ability to complete meaningful research on state priority areas. Local law enforcement will be able to track more comprehensive data by crime type and location which can be disseminated to the public and elected public officials will have access to more complete data to help shape public policy.
CA/NCF
