You cannot run an effective public safety system on guesswork. Every officer who has stood in a command briefing, every prosecutor who has built a case from fragmentary records and every policymaker who has tried to evaluate whether a program is actually working already knows this. Evidence-based policy depends entirely on the quality and accessibility of underlying data. When that data is siloed, delayed or simply unavailable to researchers, policymakers are left flying blind on decisions that directly affect public safety.
This is why Tennessee lawmakers recently introduced one of the first bills modeled on the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) new Researcher Access to Data Act. The bill would require criminal justice agencies across the full spectrum — courts, law enforcement, corrections and supervision — to share data with qualified researchers who meet certain requirements. Georgia lawmakers introduced a similar bill this session. The willingness to put researcher access into statute sends a clear signal: This is not a niche academic concern; it is a core public safety issue.
The Tennessee bill did not emerge in a vacuum. In 2025, the state's comptroller released a report on Shelby County’s criminal justice system that exposed the depth of the data problem in stark terms. Researchers found that the lack of a unique case identifier made it nearly impossible to track individuals as cases move through the court system from arrest to resolution. Shelby County, which processes more criminal cases than the next three largest Tennessee counties combined, could not reliably tell state auditors how long cases were taking to resolve, what percentage of defendants re-offended while awaiting trial or how charges changed between arrest and prosecution. The fact that basic performance data was unavailable for Tennessee's most burdened court system is not just a transparency failure — it is a public safety failure. You cannot solve a problem you cannot measure.
Research on police data transparency has made clear that the absence of rigorous, accessible data does not just frustrate researchers — it erodes public trust in institutions that cannot demonstrate how they are performing. Data transparency is not a concession to critics of law enforcement; it is one of the strongest tools law enforcement has to demonstrate professionalism and build the community trust that effective policing requires.
The ALEC model policyis carefully designed to address the legitimate concerns on both sides of this debate. It requires agencies to share data with “bona fide researchers” — those with institutional review board approval, data security protocols and commitments that personally identifiable information will not be disclosed in published findings. It distinguishes between data already subject to public disclosure and more sensitive records, allowing discretionary sharing of the latter while mandating the former. These safeguards matter. Agency resistance to researcher access is sometimes rooted in legitimate privacy concerns, and that deserves to be taken seriously. But resistance is also sometimes a way to avoid accountability, and a statute with clear standards and institutional safeguards removes the pretextual objections while preserving the genuine ones.
The structural barriers to researcher access are also real and should not be underestimated. Decentralized data systems, inconsistent standards and lack of documentation prevent even well-resourced researchers from getting usable data. Furthermore, many court systems either do not allow bulk data downloads, charge prohibitive fees for access or use non-standardized fields that make cross-jurisdiction analysis nearly impossible.Access varies wildly even within states, with some counties sharing data readily while adjacent ones maintain near-total opacity.
The stakes are high. Communities across the country are making major resource decisions about policing, prosecution and incarceration with inadequate data about what is actually driving outcomes. At the same time, polls consistently show that public perception of crime often diverges sharply from what official data actually shows — a gap that better, more accessible data could help close.
Decades of research have established that evidence-based approaches to public safety produce superior outcomes precisely because they allow agencies to identify what works, adjust what does not, and demonstrate results to the communities they serve. None of that is possible without data that researchers can access and analyze. A recent analysis of state criminal justice priorities found that governors across the political spectrum are demanding better performance measurement and data-driven decision-making from their criminal justice agencies, yet the data infrastructure to support those demands often does not exist.
Tennessee's bill, Georgia's bill and the ALEC model policy they are built on represent a serious framework for expanding researcher access in a way that protects privacy, maintains agency accountability and strengthens the evidence base for public safety decisions.Without clear statutory requirements, the inertia of fragmented, inaccessible data systems tends to win. Criminal justice progress built on advocacy without evidence is not progress — it is politics. Other states now have a model. They should use it.
Jillian E. Snider is a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, an adjunct lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired New York City police officer.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
