AndreaBozzo/ceres-open-data-index huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) Program in the United States, 1995-1999

This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the Gang
 Resistance Education And Training (GREAT) program by surveying five
 different groups: students in a cross-sectional design (Part 1), law
 enforcement officers (Part 2), educators (Part 3), parents (Part 4),
 and students in a longitudinal design (Part 5). Middle school students
 in the cross-sectional design were surveyed to examine GREAT's short-
 and long-term effects, and to assess the quality and effectiveness of
 officer training. Law enforcement officers were surveyed to determine
 whether their perceptions and expectations of the GREAT program varied
 depending on sex, race, rank, age, level of education, and length of
 time working in policing. Data were collected from middle school
 personnel (administrators, counselors, and teachers) in order to
 assess educators' attitudes toward and perceptions of the
 effectiveness of the GREAT program, including the curriculum's
 appropriateness for middle school students and its effectiveness in
 delinquency and gang prevention both in the school and in the
 community. Parents were surveyed to assess their attitudes toward
 crime and gangs in their community, school prevention programs, the
 role of police in the school, and their satisfaction with and
 perceptions of the effectiveness of the GREAT program. The middle
 school students participating in the longitudinal aspect of this study
 were surveyed to examine the change in attitudes and behavior, germane
 to gang activity, over time. Variables for all parts were geared
 toward assessing perception and attitudes about the police and the
 GREAT program and their overall effectiveness, community involvement,
neighborhood crime, and gang-related activities.

Tags: crime-prevention, educational-programs, educators, gang-violence, gangs, police-officers, police-training, program-evaluation, students
Organization: Department of Justice
Longitudinal Evaluation of Chicago's Community Policing Program, 1993-2001

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the long-term
organizational transition of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to a
community policing model. The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy
(CAPS) was an ambitious plan to reorganize the CPD, restructure its
management, redefine its mission, and forge a new relationship between
police and city residents. This evaluation of the CAPS program
included surveys of police officers, residents, and program activists.
In addition, observational data were collected from beat meetings, and
aggregate business establishment and land-use data were added to
describe the police beats and districts.

Tags: citizen-participation, community-involvement, community-participation, community-policing, police, police-citizen-interactions, police-community-relations, program-evaluation
Organization: Department of Justice
National Survey of Investigations in the Community Policing Context, 1997

This survey collected descriptive information from
municipal police departments and sheriffs offices across the United
States to determine whether the departments had implemented community
policing, how their investigative functions were organized, and the
ways in which their investigative organizational structure may have
been modified to accommodate a community policing approach. The
research project involved a national mail survey of municipal police
departments and sheriffs offices in all jurisdictions with populations
of more than 50,000 and 100 or more sworn officers. The survey was
mailed in the late fall of 1997. Data contain responses from 405
municipal departments and 196 sheriffs offices. Questionnaires were
similar but were modified depending on whether they were sent to
municipal or sheriffs agencies. Data generated by the questionnaires
provide descriptive information about the agencies, including agency
type, state, size of population served, number of full-time and
part-time sworn and civilian personnel, number of auxiliary and rescue
personnel, number of detectives, whether the sworn personnel were
represented by a bargaining unit, and if the agency was
accredited. Respondents reported whether community policing had been
implemented and, if so, identified various features that described
community policing as it was structured in their agency, including
year implementation began, number of sworn personnel with assignments
that included community policing activities, and if someone was
specifically responsible for overseeing community policing activities
or implementation. Also elicited was information about the
organization of the investigative function, including number of sworn
personnel assigned specifically to the investigative/detective
function, the organizational structure of this function, location and
assignment of investigators or the investigative function,
specialization of detectives/investigators, their pay scale compared
to patrol officers, their relationship with patrol officers, and their
chain-of-command. Finally, respondents reported whether the
investigative structure or function had been modified to accommodate a
community policing approach, and if so, the year the changes were
first implemented.

Tags: community-policing, law-enforcement-agencies, organizational-structure, police-departments, police-officers, program-evaluation
Organization: Department of Justice
Drinking and Driving:  A Survey of Licensed Drivers in the United States, 1983

This study focuses on the drinking and driving habits of
 Americans. The questionnaire contained 51 questions. Respondents were
 interviewed over the telephone and asked about their frequency of
 consumption of alcoholic beverages, where they most often drank, 
 their mode of transportation to and from this location, their driving
 and drinking experiences, and their age, sex, educational attainment,
and socioeconomic status.

Tags: alcohol, alcohol-consumption, demographic-characteristics, drinking-behavior, driving-habits, driving-under-the-influence, united-states
Organization: Department of Justice
Profiling Inmates in the Los Angeles County Jail, 1996-1998

By 1996 it became apparent that the Los Angeles county
 jails faced a serious overcrowding problem. Two possible solutions to
 the problem were to build more jail capacity or to divert a greater
 number of incoming inmates to community-based, intermediate
 sanctions. The research team for this study was asked to review a 1996
 profile of inmates in the Los Angeles jail system and to determine how
 many of them might have been good candidates for intermediate
 sanctions such as electronic monitoring, work release, house arrest,
 and intensive supervision. The researchers selected a sample of 1,000
 pre-adjudicated (or unconvicted) inmates from the total census of
 inmates in jail custody on January 15, 1996, to study in more detail.
 Of the 1,000 offenders, the researchers were able to obtain jail and
 recidivism data for two years for 931 inmates. For each of these
 offenders, information on their prior criminal history, current
 offense, and subsequent recidivism behavior was obtained from official
 records maintained by several county agencies, including pretrial
 services, sheriff's department, probation, and courts. Demographic
 variables include date of birth, race, and gender. Prior criminal
 history variables for each prior adult arrest include type of filing
 charge, case disposition, type of sentence and sentence length
 imposed, and total number of prior juvenile petitions sustained.
 Current offense variables include arrest date, crime type for current
 arrest, crime charge, type and date of final case disposition, and
 sentence type and length, if convicted. Strike information collected
 includes number of strikes and the offense that qualified as a
 strike. Jail custody variables include the jail entry and exit data
 for the current offense and the reason for release, if released.
 Lastly, two-year follow-up variables include the date, type, and
 disposition of each subsequent arrest between January 15, 1996, and
January 15, 1998.

Tags: alternatives-to-institutionalization, criminal-histories, criminality-prediction, jail-inmates, offender-profiles, prison-overcrowding, recidivism, sanctions
Organization: Department of Justice
Homicide, Bereavement, and the Criminal Justice System in Texas, 2000

This study assessed the influence of the criminal justice
system on the bereavement process of individuals who have lost loved
ones to homicide. The primary question motivating this research was:
Can the criminal justice system help to heal the harm of the
bereaved's loss? The three main goals of this study were to examine:
(1) bereaveds' perceptions of and experiences with the criminal
justice system and its professionals, (2) the ways criminal justice
professionals perceive and manage the bereaved, and (3) the nature of
the association between the criminal justice system and bereaveds'
psychological well-being. Data were obtained from in-depth interviews
conducted in June through December 2000 with two different groups of
people. The first group represented individuals who had lost loved
ones to murder between 1994 and 1998 in one county in Texas (Parts
1-33). The second group (Parts 34-55) was comprised county criminal
justice professionals (murder detectives, prosecutors, criminal court
judges, victim's service counselors, and victim's rights advocates).
For Parts 1-33, interviewees were asked a series of open-ended
questions about the criminal justice system, including how they
learned about the death and the current disposition of the murder
case. They also were asked what they would change about the criminal
justice system's treatment of them. The bereaved were further asked
about their sex, age, race, education, marital status, employment
status, income, and number of children. Additional questions were
asked regarding the deceased's age at the time of the murder, race,
relationship to interviewee, and the deceased's relationship to the
murderer, if known. For Parts 34-55, respondents were asked about
their job titles, years in those positions, number of murder cases
handled in the past year, number of murder cases handled over the
course of their career, and whether they thought the criminal justice
system could help to heal the harm of people who had lost loved ones
to murder. All interviews (Parts 1-55) were tape-recorded and later
transcribed by the interviewer, who replaced actual names of
individuals, neighborhoods, cities, counties, or any other
identifiable names with pseudonyms.

Tags: criminal-justice-system, death-counseling, grief, homicide, judges, loss-adjustment, murder, prosecuting-attorneys, psychological-wellbeing, victim-services
Organization: Department of Justice
Spatial Analysis of Crime in Appalachia [United States], 1977-1996

This research project was designed to demonstrate the
 contributions that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial
 analysis procedures can make to the study of crime patterns in a
 largely nonmetropolitan region of the United States. The project
 examined the extent to which the relationship between various
 structural factors and crime varied across metropolitan and
 nonmetropolitan locations in Appalachia over time. To investigate the
 spatial patterns of crime, a georeferenced dataset was compiled at the
 county level for each of the 399 counties comprising the Appalachian
 region. The data came from numerous secondary data sources, including
 the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports, the
 Decennial Census of the United States, the Department of Agriculture,
 and the Appalachian Regional Commission. Data were gathered on the
 demographic distribution, change, and composition of each county, as
 well as other socioeconomic indicators. The dependent variables were
 index crime rates derived from the Uniform Crime Reports, with
 separate variables for violent and property crimes. These data were
 integrated into a GIS database in order to enhance the research with
 respect to: (1) data integration and visualization, (2) exploratory
 spatial analysis, and (3) confirmatory spatial analysis and
 statistical modeling. Part 1 contains variables for Appalachian
 subregions, Beale county codes, distress codes, number of families and
 households, population size, racial and age composition of population,
 dependency ratio, population growth, number of births and deaths, net
 migration, education, household composition, median family income,
 male and female employment status, and mobility. Part 2 variables
 include county identifiers plus numbers of total index crimes, violent
 index crimes, property index crimes, homicides, rapes, robberies,
 assaults, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts annually
from 1977 to 1996.

Tags: crime-mapping, crime-patterns, crime-reporting, demographic-characteristics, geographic-information-systems
Organization: Department of Justice
Using Public Health Databases to Analyze Legal Intervention Shootings, United States, 2006-2017

This project used national databases to describe the incidence and distribution of fatal and nonfatal police shootings and to develop an empirically based typology of legal intervention homicides. To accomplish this, the study team evaluated the comprehensiveness of the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) for fatal police shootings along with various open-source databases. The study team also explained the variation across states in fatal police shootings using a validated national database (Washington Post "Fatal Force Database") and is currently examining the variation in fatal police shooting across urban vs. rural areas.

Tags: gun-use, homicide, intervention, police, police-reports
Organization: Department of Justice
Evaluation of the P2P Challenging Extremism Initiative, Massachusetts and Utah, 2016-2019

This project convened experts and practitioners in the areas of program evaluation, radicalization to violent extremism, and social media analytics in order to generate and integrate scientifically derived knowledge into strategies for effective prevention and intervention against domestic radicalization and violent extremism in the United States. More specifically, we generated substantive evaluation data, which can be used by practitioners and policy makers to enhance the creation and dissemination of effective counter-narratives for reducing the threat of ideologically-motivated violence in the US. We used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate an existing nationwide initiative, Peer-to-Peer (P2P): Challenging Extremism, which aims at engaging youth in countering violent extremism in schools and online arenas.
The project had four specific objectives: 1) Evaluate the content and dissemination of the P2P Initiative social media products, 2) evaluate the impact of the P2P Initiative on youth engaged in its development, 3) evaluate the impact of youth exposure to the P2P educational activities, and 4) assess the drivers of success and barriers in the implementation of the initiative.
To complete these objectives, the following research phases were conducted:
A secondary review of 150 P2P social media products created between fall 2015 and spring 2017, including data on end-users interactivity.
Phone and in-person group interviews with faculty and students engaged in the P2P Initiative.
A prospective cohort study evaluating the impact of the Kombat with Kindness (KWK) campaign on Utah secondary school students, using a pre-post intervention design.
A randomized control study evaluating the impact of the Operation 250 (OP250) on Massachusetts secondary school students, using a pre-post intervention design.
Phone interviews with faculty who implemented the P2P Initiative.

Tags: cultural-attitudes, education, evaluation, extremism, hate-crimes, internet, radicalism, social-media
Organization: Department of Justice
Miami-Dade County Public Schools Campus Shield Evaluation, Miami, Florida, United States, 2014-2019

In 2015, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) received
a three-year Comprehensive School Safety Initiative grant from the National
Institute of Justice to implement, pilot test, and experimentally evaluate the
effects of an innovative fusion center, Campus
Shield, for proactively identifying
and addressing school safety threats and issues. Three additional
resources were also proposed to supplement and enhance the Campus Shield fusion
center: visitor management systems (information on entries and exits from the
school building to be recorded and fed into Campus Shield), surveillance
cameras (which would also feed into Campus Shield), and the linkage of Campus
Shield to "Mental Health Specialists" to provide direct services and act as a
liaison between school-based student services professionals and community-based
providers.

Tags: mental-health, school-safety-and-security
Organization: Department of Justice
Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations, United States, 2005-2014

A troubling aspect of justice system response to intimate partner violence is custody courts' failure to protect children when mothers allege the father is abusive. Family courts' errors in assessing adult and child abuse, and punitive responses to abuse allegations, have been widely documented. A significant contributor to these errors is the pseudo-scientific theory of parental alienation (PA). Originally termed parental alienation syndrome (PAS), the theory suggests that when mothers allege that a child is not safe with the father, they are doing so illegitimately, to alienate the child from the father. PA labeling often results in dismissal of women's and children's reports of abuse, and sometimes trumps even expert child abuse evaluations. PAS was explicitly based on negative stereotypes of mothers and has been widely discredited. However, the term parental alienation is still widely used in ways that are virtually identical to PAS. However, because PA is nominally gender neutral (and not called a scientific syndrome), it continues to have substantial credibility in court.
The first goal of the study was to ascertain whether empirical evidence indicated that parental alienation is also gender-biased in practice and outcome. Drawing from courts' own reports of facts, findings, and outcomes, such research could inform advocates and the courts regarding the validity or invalidity of relying on PA to strip mothers of their children and potentially subject children to ongoing abuse. Second, inspired by some tentative findings, the study sought to explore outcomes in custody/abuse litigation by gender and by differing types of abuse. The study relied solely on electronically available published opinions in child custody cases; to date, the researchers have identified 240 cases involving alienation and alienation plus abuse. The researchers sought to expand the database to include non-alienation abuse cases as a comparison, and to address additional questions about custody/abuse adjudications.

Tags: abuse-allegations, alienation, child-custody, parental-rights
Organization: Department of Justice
Effects of Stress Among Correctional Officers, United States, 2017-2018

There is a growing body of empirical evidence to suggest (1) that correctional officers are exposed through their work to a number of stressors and, as a result, have a higher level of job-related stress than is found in other occupations, and (2) that stress has a variety of debilitating effects on the medical, behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional well-being of correctional officers. In light of these consistent conclusions, it is important that research extend the current state of knowledge by addressing other important empirical questions. One is the question of how correctional officer stress levels affect the well-being of the officer, as measured in terms of potential (1) attitudinal, (2) emotional and (3) behavioral effects on the officer. A second question is the extent to which correctional officer stress levels affect the well-being of the prison organization. Research in non-correctional settings finds that increased levels of a worker's stress are significantly related to three dimensions of that worker's behaviors in the organization:  (1) task performance, (2) organizational citizenship behaviors, and (3) counterproductive work behaviors. A third question explored is the degree to which the individual-level effects of stress mediate the organizational-level effects of stress. Finally, a fourth question to be explored is the extent to which officer stress levels are correlated with, and can be predicted by, data routinely collected by the state department of corrections, such as performance evaluations, workplace injuries, overtime, grievances, and incident reports.

Tags: correctional-officers, cynicism, depersonalization, depression-psychology, job-stress, work-attitudes
Organization: Department of Justice
Richmond, Virginia/Police Foundation Domestic Violence Partnership, 1999-2000


This study involved the evaluation of the Second Responders Program in Richmond, Virginia as well as a process evaluation of the researcher/practitioner partnership formed between the Police Foundation, the Richmond Police Department, and the Richmond Department of Social Services. Findings were based on two waves of victim interviews with women who received Second Responder intervention and women who received only police intervention. Field researchers contacted eligible subjects and attempted to interview them within 1 week of the domestic violence incident to which police were called.  The second interview took place 6 months later.  Interviews took place between April, 1999 and December, 2000.  The Part 1 (Wave 1 Data) file contains 158 cases and 318 variables.  The Part 2 (Wave 2 Data) file contains 120 cases and 691 variables.


Tags: domestic-assault, domestic-violence, victim-services, victimization, violence, violence-against-women
Organization: Department of Justice