Funding Recommendations
Funding Recommendations
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is the principal federal agency responsible for collecting, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operations of the justice system. But years of insufficient funding have hampered the bureau’s ability to provide timely, accurate, complete, and usable information on crime trends and the justice system, impeding the ability of policymakers to adjust public safety strategies rapidly and effectively.
Based on the findings and recommendations presented above, the Crime Trends Working Group recommends that Congress increase appropriations for statistical collections to $75 million for FY 2025, scaling up to $93 million in FY 2026. BJS should be funded at a level that allows it to perform its mandated functions and assume a new role in analyzing and publishing national crime trends data, without having to rely on transfers from the Office of Justice Programs and the Office for Victims of Crime. While far greater increases are warranted in the short and longer term, the Working Group believes these amounts can be administered responsibly and will tangibly improve the nation’s crime data infrastructure.
Increasing BJS funding to $93 million would allow the agency to conduct the following new initiatives:
- Enhance its website, adding a dashboard that shows monthly crime trends for a sample of cities and that aggregates historical time series data for multiple data sets, at a cost of roughly $4 million annually
- Support the publication of a comprehensive annual compendium of crime in the U.S. and regular reports on firearms crime trends with an additional $3 million for staff and resources
- Support states with grants for low- or no-cost records management software for use among state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies, with $4 million in one-time additional funding
- Resume the Survey of Local Jail Inmates and the Survey of Prison Inmates every five years, at a cost of $4 million per administrative year
- Support the development of a National Justice Data Analysis Center to enhance data analysis and data science across the criminal justice and public health systems, at a cost of $3 million annually
In addition to its recommendation that Congress increase funding for BJS, the Working Group makes several funding recommendations regarding other federal agencies:
- Hold the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) harmless in any shifting of functions to BJS, allowing the FBI to reinvest savings to bolster staffing at its Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division, with a focus on data collection and quality control
- Provide permanent operational funding for the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Crime and Corrections Analyst in Residence program, at a cost of $3 million annually
- Double the number of state health departments participating in the Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program’s Advancing Violence Epidemiology in Real-Time (FASTER: AVERT) initiative, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 12 to 24, at a cost of $1.8 million annually, as the next step in moving toward implementing FASTER: AVERT in all 50 states.
- Expand participation in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-Firearm Injury Surveillance System (NEISS-FISS) from roughly 85 hospitals to the full sample of 100 hospitals, incurring a one-time cost of approximately $300,000
- Provide funding to support the integration and linking of crime trends and public health data, at a cost of $500,000 annually for five years
