The alabama SAC (located in the alabama law enforcement agency - alea) requests funds for a core capacity and special emphasis project

The Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) will receive $223,250 from the Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics under the State Justice Statistics Program for Statistical Analysis Centers (CFDA 16.550) cooperative agreement for the period of October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2023. ALEA will use the funding to support continued improvements to the National Incident-Based Reporting System data portal and enhance user experience for stakeholders. Additionally, ALEA will partner with the University of Alabama Institute of Data & Analytics to transition statistical crime data analysis efforts. The funding will also support two special emphasis projects including comparing violent crime-related emergency room admission diagnoses data from the Alabama Department of Public Health to ALEA's crime reporting database, and potentially integrating summarized emergency room data into ALEA's repository to improve understanding of unreported crime. Findings will be published on ALEA's crime statistics website and shared with ALEA administrators.

For the core capacity project, the SAC requests funds to support the continued improvement of the national incident-based reporting system (nibrs) data into a state portal with an enhanced user experience for alea's stakeholders. As part of the proposed efforts, alea continues to transition its statistical crime data analysis efforts to the institute of data & analytics at UA. This partnership is similar to efforts among other state law enforcement agencies where faculty and researchers at universities use their skills to provide new insights and methods into state-level crime data. Expected outcomes from the core capacity project include: 1) support for updates to the data extraction and loading processes; 2) improved query efficiency of alea's database; 3) enhanced user features and functionality; and 4) specialized reports utilizing nibrs detailed data. The objective of the special-emphasis project is two-fold. The first objective is to investigate the number of alabama patients admitted to local emergency rooms (ERS) that were diagnosed by a provider as having been afflicted by a violent crime according to the international classification of diseases version 10 (ICD-10) codes. These efforts will be supported through data provided by adph (alabama department of public health). This support is documented via a letter of support attached to the narrative. These numbers will be compared to those related incidents in alea's crime reporting database. If findings from the first objective warrant increased attention, the second objective of the special-emphasis project is to officially integrate summarized ER data into alea's existing data repository to improve community stakeholders' understanding of unreported crime. Findings from this project will be published as a special report on alea's crime statistics website, https://crime.alabama.GOV. Moreover, detailed findings not published in the special report could be shared with alea's administrators so they could plan an educational campaign with community stakeholders focused on the impact of local violent crimes.