State of Florida Department of Law Enforcement Ensures Accurate Statewide Crime Reporting and Analysis

The State of Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) promotes public safety and strengthens domestic security by providing services in partnership with local, state, and federal criminal justice agencies to prevent, investigate, and solve crimes while protecting citizens and visitors.

FDLE’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) is the central repository of criminal history records, providing statistical information regarding crime for use by policymakers and that which is of public interest. CJIS ensures the quality of the data and plays a major role in policy development for national sharing of criminal justice information with the FBI and other states.

Florida’s legacy data collection, analysis, validation, and dissemination processes was a mixture of manual and automated activities performed by agency staff members requiring multiple, disparate information systems. The process depended on staff in about 500 agencies performing interdependent tasks in a timely and correct manner.

To mitigate the disparity in Florida’s criminal justice data, CJIS built a structure that collects data on an event and/or a person. It starts from the point of a law enforcement call for service and continues to an arrest event and through the entire court process.

To lessen the reporting burden on state and local agencies, CJIS developed a NIEM XML schema for agencies to collect and share standardized, uniform criminal justice data. Standardization is essential reducing the work effort on the state and local agencies submitting data to FDLE, and in turn to national partners, such as the FBI.