The florida department of law enforcement (fdle) seeks to complete two projects that will build analytic capacity for understanding violence between law enforcement officers and criminal suspects

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) was awarded a $225,000 cooperative agreement by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (CFDA 16.550 - State Justice Statistics Program for Statistical Analysis Centers) to conduct two research projects. The first project will assess the quality and completeness of Florida's new incident-based crime reporting system (FIBRS) data, focusing on violent interactions between law enforcement officers and criminal suspects. The second project will link FDLE's existing criminal history (CCH) and law enforcement officer killed/assaulted (LEOKA) databases to create a new analytical dataset that can help inform evidence-based training to reduce assaults on officers and use of force against suspects. These projects aim to enhance FDLE's analytic capacity for understanding violence between law enforcement and criminal suspects in Florida.

The first study (area i-a) will examine the quality and completeness of newly available florida incident-based reporting system (fibrs) data and demonstrate their utility for understanding violent police-suspect interactions. Given that law enforcement agencies in florida began to submit data to fibrs relatively recently and participation continues to grow, an important task at this early stage of data collection is to assess the quality and completeness of data. This study will do so by examining how participating agencies have recorded the relationship(s) between the victim(s) and offender(s) of violent offenses with a particular focus on incidents where the victim was a law enforcement officer or force was used against a criminal suspect as indicated in floridas use of force (UOF) database. In addition to assessing the ability of fibrs to indicate incidents that were formerly reported specifically to the law enforcement officers killed and assaulted (leoka) database, this project will also assess the value of linking incident-based data from fibrs to criminal history data available in the computerized criminal history (CCH) database. Linking these datasets may help further illuminate the conditions under which violent police-suspect interactions are more likely to occur. The second study (area II-b) will create a new analytical dataset by linking two existing datasets maintained by the fdle: the CCH database and the leoka database. These two datasets were created for separate purposes and contain conceptually distinct data elements, with CCH focusing on criminal histories and leoka focusing on characteristics of violent police-suspect encounters. Linking these two separate sources of data will create a very informative dataset that will allow for an exploration of factors related to reciprocal violence between law enforcement officers and suspects. The analyses from this study will be useful in developing evidence-informed training for police officers in florida that may be used to reduce assaults of officers and the use of force by officers against suspects.