Statistical Data Usage in Criminal Justice Leadership Essay

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When leaders in the field of criminal justice are going to develop, change or implement policies within their field, it is always important that these developments, changes and implementations are grounded in evidence. Evidence-based practice is universally recognized as essential to good decision making (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart & Wright, 2003). In order to use the evidence, one has to obtain the evidence—and that happens by way of statistical analysis and research. Researchers who gather, assess and use statistical data to understand an issue and devise a solution to a problem are grounding their work in evidence that can be quantified. When evidence can be quantified—i.e., statistically measured—it is easier to see when policies are working and when they are not. For example, in criminal justice policy making, leaders might want to institute a new way method for police to report internally on abuses in the workplace. The method they choose, however, may have been shown to be ineffective through statistical analysis by a number of studies conducted by researchers in the criminal justice field. If the leaders see this or have access to the data, they can re-think their desire to implement such an ineffective policy and save their department a great deal of headache and cost by going back to the drawing board and developing or implementing a policy that will work, according to the statistical data available. This paper will show why using statistical data is so important and critical for criminal justice leadership: without it, leaders are essentially making decisions without evidence based on quantifiably measured information—i.e., they are flying blindly.

Statistical data helps leaders to understand in clear, precise and concise numbers exactly to what degree a strategy or policy is effective. Statistics have a way of simplifying how people understand a problem or a phenomenon.

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They also are the result of procedures that can be re-tested and verified, so there is less risk that a researcher is simply making up results in order to produce an outcome that is desired by this or that stakeholder. Such is the problem with qualitative studies: the research methods involved in qualitative analysis can be less rigorous and informative for researchers and professionals than quantitative analysis. Yet some leaders will prefer basing their policies on qualitative literature because it is thematic, conceptual and oftentimes more emotionally appealing. Quantitative studies, however, appeal to the logical side of the mind, the empirical aspect of research, which requires physical evidence that can be seen and duplicated in a second and third study so that results and statistics are verified. Statistical data can be tested and proved accurate in ways that qualitative data simply cannot be.

For criminal justice policy making, statistical support can come in a number of ways. For example, as Sibley (2015) points out, statistical data is a great way to create a database of information that can be used to shape the way leaders in criminal justice go about making decisions regarding policy. The better the database, the more information they have to draw upon, and the better informed those decisions will be. Sibley (2015) notes that “the most well-known criminal justice data set is the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), collected by the FBI since 1930. The UCR includes statistics on seven crimes classified as either violent crime or property crime: murder, rape, assault and robbery fall under the violent crimes category, while arson, burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft fall under property crimes.” A database like the one maintained….....

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References

Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B., & Wright, P. M. (2003). Gaining a competitive advantage. Irwin: McGraw-Hill.

Sibley, R. (2015). The benefits of criminal justice data: Beyond policing. Retrieved from https://sunlightfoundation.com/2015/05/01/the-benefits-of-criminal-justice-data-beyond-policing/

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