The WA Juvenile Justice Data Dashboard Initiative aims to fill an important gap in our knowledge of the juvenile justice system and help us with the larger work of comparing decision point data in order to understand where disparities increase and decrease. We anticipate this will include linked dashboards on: arrests, court filed diversions, court processing stages (e.g., referrals, cases, and adjudications), detention admissions, and recidivism. There will likely be additional dashboards that cover related topics, such as victimization and non-offender matters. The Juvenile Justice Data Dashboard Initiative is a collaborative partnership between the Washington State Center for Court Research, the Partnership Council on Juvenile Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice.
Law Enforcement Data Analysis
We began this initiative with Law Enforcement Data Analysis (LEDA) because arrest represents the entrance into the justice system for the majority of youth. We analyzed arrest data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC) and contextualized it with population estimates from the Office of Financial Management (OFM). We then calculated the number of arrests per 1,000 youth in that population for each jurisdiction. This process created a contextualized, universal unit of measure and eliminated one barrier to comparing arrest numbers across jurisdictions. Prior to this effort, there was no single, accessible source to examine disparities in Washington State juvenile arrest data. The Law Enforcement Data Analysis (LEDA) data dashboard serves as a useful tool for governmental and non-governmental agencies as well as local law enforcement agencies to analyze trends of youth arrest and identify specific areas where changes in policy and practice are necessary and possible.
- LEDA dashboard
- Begin by viewing a short tutorial for proper interpretation of the data and optimize your use of the LEDA dashboard.
- If you are experiencing difficulty accessing the dashboard, please email Jenny.Young@dcyf.wa.gov.
- We would appreciate hearing from you about the utility of the dashboard. Please respond by completing a simple questionnaire.