A Practical Guide to Analytics for Governments

CHAPTER 10Center of Analytics

Kay Meyer

A doctoral engineering student from India, nearly ready to take his PhD-qualifying exams, is murdered in his apartment near the campus of a prominent American university. Just weeks later, the student body president and recipient of a prestigious scholarship at a neighboring university is kidnapped and murdered. Similar to 9/11, the investigation into these murders revealed that law enforcement, probation, and the courts had key information about the suspects—information with the potential to have changed the ultimate outcome for these two students—but that data was isolated across multiple criminal justice systems, making it difficult and time consuming to access and review.

This tragic series of events demonstrates the need to change our way of thinking and our way of using data. My team and I were tasked with fixing this problem in our criminal justice community by building an integrated, statewide criminal justice system—a single system to provide comprehensive profiles of offenders and enable alerting on changes in offender status. The objective was to put critical information into the hands of law enforcement, courts, and correction personnel and enhance their efforts to manage, locate, and interact with the offender population and, most importantly, improve public safety.

While the reason for developing the system was based on tragedy, the development and implementation of the system was one of the most fulfilling experiences of ...