MNSAC Crime and Justice Data Dashboard Project

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 Minnesota Statistical Analysis Center (MNSAC) is a unit of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Office of Justice Programs (OJP), which serves as Minnesota's State Administering Agency (SAA). The MNSAC is a small SAC with only two employees, and one to two Masters level interns each year to enhance capacity. Under the FY 2014 SJS program the MNSAC proposes to develop a criminal justice system data dashboard to allow public access to data across many criminal justice agencies including arrest, court, probation and correctional data. The MNSAC will purchase and learn Tableau software to publish key crime and justice system data and will result in a completely new way for stakeholders to access crime and justice system data in Minnesota. It will allow users to easily manipulate data for specific needs and purposes. Additionally, this proposal will provide the MNSAC staff an opportunity to learn a new and valuable skill set in data visualization and web publishing. CA/NCF