The John Jay College Center for Policing Equity (CPE) runs the National Justice Database, an ambitious project to collect and standardize data and rapidly produce useful reports tailored to each department that participates. Hurdles around data quality and inconsistency from one department to the next have long frustrated criminal justice researchers, but CPE has a ringer on its team — Google’s philanthropic wing has supplied millions of dollars and some of its software engineering talent.
The database, which is not open for public inspection, has so far been built from data that municipal police departments have allowed the center to access, and Malloy wants Connecticut to be the first state to participate in the program. There is no legislative mandate for the state’s 93 municipal departments to participate, but Malloy was joined for the announcement of the program in Washington, D.C., Wednesday by officials from the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association. More than 50 departments are said to already have signed agreements with CPE. The agreements won’t cost the departments any money.
