[Federal Register Volume 88, Number 32 (Thursday, February 16, 2023)]
[Notices]
[Pages 10150-10153]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2023-03260]


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OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY


Request for Information; Criminal Justice Statistics

AGENCY: Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

ACTION: Notice of request for information.

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SUMMARY: Executive Order, Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and 
Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety, 
states that building trust in policing and criminal justice requires 
``transparency through data collection and public reporting.'' The 
Executive Order calls for issuing a report to the President on the 
current data collection, use, and data transparency practices with 
respect to law enforcement activities. This includes data related to 
calls for service, searches, stops, frisks, seizures, arrests, 
complaints, law enforcement demographics, and civil asset forfeiture. 
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), on 
behalf of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and in 
coordination

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with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, is requesting 
public input to inform this report.

DATES: Interested persons and organizations are invited to submit 
comments on or before 5 p.m. ET March 30, 2023.

ADDRESSES: You may submit comments by any of the following methods:
     Email: [email protected], include ``Criminal 
Justice Statistics RFI'' in the message subject line. Email submissions 
should be machine-readable [PDF, Word], all attachments must be 25MB or 
less, and responses should not be copy-protected. Due to time 
constraints, mailed paper submissions will not be accepted, and 
electronic submissions received after the deadline cannot be ensured to 
be incorporated or taken into consideration.
    Instructions: Response to this RFI is voluntary. Each responding 
entity (individual or organization) is requested to submit only one 
response, in English. Respondents may answer as many or as few 
questions as they wish. Please identify the question number(s) 
associated with your answer. Submissions must be at most 7 pages in 11-
point or larger font (3,500 words). Responses should include the name 
of the person(s) or organization(s) filing the comment, as well as the 
respondent type (e.g., academic institution, advocacy group, 
professional society, community-based organization, industry, member of 
the public, government, or other).
    We encourage all members of the public interested in this 
initiative to submit their comments. OSTP and the Criminal Justice 
Statistics Working Group will consider each comment, whether it 
contains a personal narrative, experiences with the Federal government, 
or more technical legal, research, or scientific content.
    OSTP will not respond directly to submissions. This RFI is not 
accepting applications for financial assistance or financial 
incentives. Comments submitted in response to this notice are subject 
to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Responses to this RFI may be 
posted online without notice. OSTP requests that no proprietary, 
copyrighted, or personally identifiable information be submitted in 
response to this RFI.
    In accordance with FAR 15-202(3), responses to this notice are not 
offers and cannot be accepted by the U.S. Government to form a binding 
contract. Additionally, the U.S. Government will not pay for response 
preparation or the use of any information contained in the response.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Karin Underwood, at OSTP, by email at 
[email protected] or by phone at 202-456-6121. Individuals who 
use telecommunication devices for the deaf and hard of hearing (TDD) 
may call the Federal Relay Service (FRS) at 1-800-877-8339, 24 hours a 
day, every day of the year, including holidays.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: On May 25, 2022, President Biden signed an 
Executive Order (E.O.) on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and 
Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety 
(E.O. 14074). This E.O. aimed to enhance public trust and public safety 
by promoting accountability, transparency, equality, and dignity in 
policing and the criminal justice system. The E.O. recognized that 
better data practices are a vital component of advancing these 
objectives, noting that ``Building trust between law enforcement 
agencies and the communities they are sworn to protect and serve also 
requires accountability for misconduct and transparency through data 
collection and public reporting.''
    Improving the collection, use, and transparency of criminal justice 
data enables a more rigorous assessment of the extent to which law 
enforcement agency procedures and policies yield fair, just, and 
impartial treatment of all individuals, including those in underserved 
communities. To improve outcomes for communities, we need to identify 
effective and emerging practices and opportunities to accelerate the 
adoption and adaptation of those practices across the nation's 
approximately 18,000 State, Tribal, local, territorial (STLT) law 
enforcement agencies. To help reach this goal, the E.O. directed the 
Equitable Data Working Group to work with the National Science and 
Technology Council (NSTC) to create an Interagency Working Group on 
Criminal Justice Statistics and tasked this group to develop a report 
about how to collect and publish data on police practices.
    In this RFI, we are seeking the following:
    1. Information to understand the current data collection, use, and 
transparency practices across STLT law enforcement activities.
    2. Best practice examples and lessons learned from STLT law 
enforcement agencies and other entities in the criminal justice system 
related to how they have collected, used, and/or made transparent data 
disaggregated by demographic information, geographic information, and 
other variables to inform changes to policies, procedures, and 
protocols to produce more equitable outcomes.
    3. Recommendations on how to build the capacity and ability of STLT 
law enforcement agencies to collect, use, and make transparent, 
comprehensive, high-quality, and disaggregated data on law enforcement 
activities.
    Law enforcement agencies can use data to foster collaborations 
across all levels of government, neighboring jurisdictions, and a 
diverse community of external organizations. Public-facing tools and 
dashboards can allow civil society organizations and communities to 
visualize and use data about police activities and chart their local 
law enforcement agency's progress toward equitable outcomes. However, 
for these efforts to increase police accountability and legitimacy and 
to improve community participation, they must take into account the 
data analysis capacity and resources of all stakeholders.
    The Equitable Data Working Group noted in its recommendations that 
data disaggregation and transparency need to ensure that individual 
identities and personally identifiable information (PII) are protected. 
The stakes of data privacy are exceptionally high in criminal justice, 
where insufficient privacy and confidentiality can have a chilling 
effect on victim reporting--including for domestic violence and for 
hate crimes such as crimes targeted against LGBTQI+ people, religious 
minorities, and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander 
populations--which, in turn, reduces the ability of law enforcement to 
respond to, solve, and prevent crimes.1 2
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    \1\ National Science and Technology Council: Federal Evidence 
Agenda on LGBTQI+ Equity.
    \2\ DOJ Office of Violence Against Women: Improving Law 
Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence by 
Preventing Gender.
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    We invite members of the public to share perspectives on what could 
help achieve comprehensive and transparent criminal justice data and 
how the Interagency Working Group on Criminal Justice Statistics should 
address the requirements in E.O. 14074.
    Please consider the following when responding to this RFI:
     Datasets: The Working Group is tasked with issuing a 
report to the President that assesses current data collection, use, and 
data transparency practices with respect to law enforcement activities, 
including but not limited to calls for service, searches, stops, 
frisks, seizures, arrests, complaints, law enforcement

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demographics, and civil asset forfeiture. Additional datasets about law 
enforcement activities to consider include, but are not limited to: 
use-of-force, officer-involved shootings, de-escalation incidents, 
incidents (including the federally-reported National Incident-Based 
Reporting System, NIBRS), hate/bias crimes; solicitations, fees and 
fines, officer training, community engagement, vehicle pursuits, body-
worn camera/dashboard camera metadata, accidents/crashes, patrol 
locations, and assaults on officers. This RFI does not include 
surveillance technologies or body-worn camera imagery.
     Law enforcement agencies: This Working Group focuses on 
policing and criminal justice data from STLT law enforcement agencies, 
not Federal law enforcement, which is covered elsewhere in the E.O.
     Equitable data: Equitable data refers to data that allow 
for rigorous assessment of the extent to which government programs and 
policies yield consistently fair, just, and impartial treatment of all 
individuals, including those who have been historically underserved, 
marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and 
inequality. Equitable data can illuminate opportunities for targeted 
actions that will result in demonstrably improved outcomes for 
underserved communities.
     Disaggregated data: One key characteristic of equitable 
data is that it is disaggregated, or broken down into detailed sub-
categories that will differ based on the context and desired policy 
outcomes. For example, data might be disaggregated by demographics 
(e.g., race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation,\3\ 
language spoken, national origin), geography (e.g., rural/urban, police 
district, neighborhood), or other variables (disability, veteran 
status, housing status), enabling insights on disparities in access to, 
and outcomes from, government programs, policies, and services.
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    \3\ The Federal Evidence Agenda on LGBTQI+ Equity includes 
guidelines for collecting sexual orientation and gender identity 
(SOGI) data on forms and in other administrative contexts such as 
policing and criminal justice.
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    Additional context: The Equitable Data Working Group was 
established by President Biden's first Executive Order, Advancing 
Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the 
Federal Government (E.O. 13985), to study Federal data collection 
policies, programs, and infrastructure to identify inadequacies and 
provide recommendations that lay out a strategy to ``expand and refine 
the data available to the Federal Government to measure equity and 
capture the diversity of the American people.'' The Criminal Justice 
Statistics Working Group is now part of the NSTC Subcommittee on 
Equitable Data. It includes representatives of the Domestic Policy 
Council, the Office of the Counsel to the President, the Department of 
Justice, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Science and 
Technology Policy, the Gender Policy Council, the Office of Drug 
Control Policy, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of 
Homeland Security, the Department of Education, and the General 
Services Administration.

Request for Information

    OSTP seeks responses to the following questions about how STLT law 
enforcement agencies collect, use, and make data transparent to inform 
policies, procedures, and protocols to reduce disparities. Respondents 
may provide information for one or more topics below, as desired.
    1. What existing reports or research should the Federal government 
review to better understand and assess the status of data collection, 
use, and transparency in STLT law enforcement agencies? What are the 
findings of researchers, groups, and organizations researching the 
status of law enforcement agencies' data practices in general and 
disaggregated by sociodemographic and geographic variables in 
particular?
    2. What are promising and effective models for, and what are 
lessons learned from, how law enforcement agencies collect, use, and 
share disaggregated data to inform policies, procedures, and training 
to reduce disparities in policing? What are some examples of law 
enforcement agencies using these models? Note: We are seeking models 
and examples that collect, use, and share disaggregated data while 
being intentional about when data are collected and shared, as well as 
how data are protected.
    3. What datasets are critical for law enforcement agencies to 
collect in order to ensure the comprehensive and disaggregated 
collection of operational data, incident-based datasets, and other data 
to produce more equitable outcomes? Why?
    4. What communities of practice or collaborations can law 
enforcement agencies participate in to improve how they collect 
comprehensive, quality, and disaggregated data to identify and address 
disparities? How can the Federal government encourage and support the 
development of collaborations to further promote the exchange of ideas 
and best practices?
    5. What is and is not working regarding how the Federal government 
supports the collection, use, and transparency of disaggregated data on 
law enforcement activities, and why?
    6. What specific challenges and opportunities do small and 
resource-constrained STLT law enforcement agencies face in the 
collection, use, and transparency of disaggregated data to inform more 
equitable outcomes?
    7. How can software vendors (including those that build records 
management systems (RMS) and other systems) improve software design, 
development, and deployment to reduce barriers for law enforcement 
agencies to collect, use, and share comprehensive, quality, and 
disaggregated data and further incentivize them to produce more 
equitable outcomes?
    8. How might professional, academic, nonprofit, and philanthropic 
organizations support and/or make investments to help law enforcement 
agencies advance equitable and disaggregated data practices?

Data Collection

    9. How might the Federal government better understand and improve 
the technologies and data systems that law enforcement agencies use to 
collect disaggregated data?
    10. What standards must be implemented to reduce barriers to data 
collection from law enforcement? What organizations or models of data 
standards exist that could serve as a model to inform more standardized 
police and criminal justice data collection in the future?
    11. What are valuable models and lessons learned from data 
collected by organizations, groups, and researchers other than law 
enforcement agencies that are related to law enforcement activities? 
How might these practices lead to the valuable data collection that law 
enforcement agencies are unable or unwilling to collect on their own?

Use of Data

    12. What are effective examples, and what lessons have been learned 
from how law enforcement agencies use data policies, tools, and 
practices to improve how police officers interact with underserved 
populations?
    13. What are examples of law enforcement agencies using data 
policies, tools, and practices that have and have not improved how 
police officers collect, maintain, review, and act upon data regarding 
sexual assault, domestic violence, and other forms of gender-based 
violence?

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    14. What investments in human capital and data infrastructure can 
STLT law enforcement agencies make to disaggregate data and conduct 
equity assessments to inform policies, programs, and protocols to 
reduce disparities?
    15. How might philanthropic organizations and academic researchers 
work effectively with government officials to evaluate and improve data 
collection, use, and transparency practices for small and resource-
constrained STLT law enforcement agencies?

Data Transparency

    16. What are exemplary models of police-community partnerships 
where police actively work with the community to share data findings 
and discuss how these data can address community needs? What lessons 
have been learned?
    17. To what extent do law enforcement agencies currently make data 
publicly available about their efforts to reduce disparities in 
policing outcomes? What are examples and opportunities for law 
enforcement agencies to use relevant and accessible approaches to data 
transparency?
    18. How might small and resource-constrained jurisdictions 
participate in public data sharing and use it to inform decision-making 
and increase accountability?
    19. What relationship-building and what resources would be 
effective for expanding opportunities for historically underrepresented 
scholars and research institutions to access law enforcement data while 
protecting privacy?
    20. The E.O. intends to maximize STLT participation in the National 
Incident-Based Report System (NIBRS). What are the barriers and 
opportunities for improving agency participation in NIBRS, including 
its hate crime reporting section and the FBI's National Use-Of-Force 
Data Collection?
    21. How might the Federal government better share the criminal 
justice data it collects through surveys and programs like these in a 
manner that assists and empowers STLT government officials, 
researchers, and civil society to make use of such data to understand 
trends and inform policy decisions?

    Dated: February 10, 2023.
Rachel Wallace,
Deputy General Counsel.
[FR Doc. 2023-03260 Filed 2-15-23; 8:45 am]
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