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Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Justice data poorly calibrated to researchers' needs

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At a Austin City Council's Public Safety Committee meeting yesterday discussing 911 call data, the Police Department's Chief Data Officer, Jonathan Kringen, reiterated an observation that Grits has made several times over the years: "this data system is built to try to manage an activity. It's not actually built to support researcher analysis." That's the biggest problem with most criminal-justice number crunching: Data is collected at points when the bureaucracy either interacts with other government systems or makes decisions about individuals being processed. But those data serve the needs of government tracking, they can't explain the causes of crime or explore dynamics that occurred prior to government intervention. In general, we don't measure the things needed to answer the most critical questions about public safety because the data is collected for different purposes...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on September 22, 2020 (boomark / email).