Identifying the needs of criminal justice practitioners and agencies plays a critical role in how NIJ sets its agenda.
Key Components of NIJ’s Needs Identification Process
A need is a capability gap. NIJ’s identifies the needs of law enforcement, courts, and corrections agencies focuses on closing operational capability gaps. An operational capability gap is where a criminal justice practitioner or agency has an operational requirement that they cannot achieve. Sometimes, a new, improved, or repurposed technology or technology-related knowledge could bridge or help bridge that gap, e.g., the ability to notify individuals in a court building during emergencies.
This process includes:
- Eliciting actionable findings by identifying needs related to police, courts, or corrections operations with enough specificity for NIJ to construct projects to address them.
- Determining future needs in these sectors.
- Examining more narrowly focused areas by working subject matter expertise in a particular topic area to provide “deeper dives” into needs identified at the sector level.
Participants
The foundation of NIJ’s process is the practitioner. Practitioners provide unique insights into how technology can address the challenges of crime and justice, insights derived from their intimate grasp of those challenges and developed over years of dealing with them on a daily basis.
However, participants are not limited to criminal justice practitioners. They include an array of stakeholders involved in relevant communities of practice – law enforcement, courts, or corrections – such as researchers, technologists, advocacy organizations, and manufacturers. To broaden participation in the process, online interactive tools are being developed to allow users to re-prioritize the needs based on their own views of the importance of different goals.
Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative
NIJ’s process is currently carried out through the RAND Corporation’s Priority Criminal Justice Needs Initiative, which is supported through a cooperative agreement awarded by NIJ. RAND is partnered with the Police Executive Research Forum, RTI International, and the University of Denver in this effort.
Learn more about the NIJ priority criminal justice needs initiative.