Building the South Carolina SAC Website

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 South Carolina Statistical Analysis Center (SC SAC) was established in 1973 under the Comprehensive Data Systems program. The goal of this program was to establish a state level capacity for criminal justice data collection and analysis in order to better inform the public and policy-makers. The SC SAC is located in the Office of Highway Safety and Justice Programs (OHSJP). OHSJP, among its myriad duties, functions as the State Administrative Agency (SAA). The SAC has developed and maintained close working relationships with other criminal justice agencies by undertaking research and evaluation projects. The primary function of the SAC in South Carolina is to provide policy relevant information and data analysis to inform the public and policy makers.

Under the 2019 SJS program, the SC SAC will build a website that can host interactive content. Once the website exists, the interactive maps will be posted to it, and the SC SAC will generate new interactive content for the website.

To conduct the project, the SC SAC will purchase a website domain (e.g., from Google Domains or another service), using the web development platform Squarespace to build the website, posting the existing domestic violence maps to the website, and using Tableau to generate new interactive content for the website. Once complete, the SC SAC will use Tableau to analyze domestic violence data from SC incident-based reporting (SCIBRS) to create interactive content such as dashboards for users. They will build a website with Squarespace so that they can post both this content and the existing interactive domestic violence map. Downloadable datasets that underlie the interactive content will be made available on the website, as well.

(CA/NCF)