The UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab recently launched the first version of its new Measuring Justice Dashboard. Here’s some information about our new data visualization tool. Why a Dashboard? We get lots of requests from stakeholders about how the criminal justice system functions. Questions like: How often do officers use citations? How does our citation rate compare to our peer counties? What does criminal charging look like in our county? Is charging going up or down? What types of crimes are charged in our county? What’s our failure to appear rate? What percent of our cases end up being resolved by conviction? And so on. We developed the Measuring Justice Dashboard to begin to answer these questions. What’s in the Dashboard? Version 1 of the Dashboard includes metrics on citation versus arrest and summons versus warrant. For those first two metrics, you can look at data in a few different ways. First, there’s the Map view, providing an overview of practice statewide. For this and all other views, you can look at results at the state level or drill down on data for your county. You also can choose the relevant time period and type of cases that you’re interested to examine. Figure 1: Map View—Citation rates at the state level 2019-2021 Time view lets you look at citation and summons rates over time. It allows you to see, for example, how these rates have changed in different time periods, such as pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. Figure [...]
Faculty Coordinators
