BD Spokes: PLANNING: WEST: Big Data and Criminal Justice in the Western United States

Poor use of data in the public sector, in general, have been linked to lack of resources and the lack of political will necessary for more efficient and effective use of data. This is troubling, given the potential of big data to increase the transparency of government decision making to all those impacted by policy implementation. Criminal Justice is one field shifting its practices in an attempt to make its decision making process more transparent to community residents, particularly with the use of community oriented policing (COP). Recent headlines demonstrate the urgent need for police departments to build and maintain trust with their communities through greater transparency and effectiveness. Data, when used to augment police services in a transparent fashion, has been shown to lead to heightened levels of community trust and reduce negative interactions between police officers and community members. This planning grant project seeks to identify the challenges and opportunities of utilizing big data in the criminal justice system, specifically in COP through the identification and creation of key stakeholder teams, or nodes, and a systematic participatory process with three workshops designed to elicit information, data needs, and challenges and opportunities for the viability of big data and community policing in the Western US. At the completion of the project, the team and nodes will have identified a list of concrete and systemic opportunities for utilizing big data for policing.

The use of big data in the criminal justice system has the potential to address this problem by augmenting COP practices through increased efficiency in resource allocation. The intellectual merit gained from this planning grant will further link big data and criminal justice by identifying systematic obstacles from diverse sectors to adopting big data strategies. Technological innovations such as big data are often misunderstood or misapplied by policy makers, and the general public. Because of its participatory nature, this planning grant has the opportunity to more broadly impact society by engaging and informing a diverse audience around the conversation of big data. The project team also hopes to reach underrepresented groups associated with the science of big data and policy decision-making.