FY 2015 Law Enforcement Core Statistics Program (LECS)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is seeking proposals for assistance in developing, designing, and administering the Law Enforcement Core Statistics Program (LECS). In the past, the goal of the program was to provide accurate and timely national statistics about the personnel, operations, policies, and procedures of federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the United States. However, in this program, BJS is seeking to reshape the content and focus toward measuring agency performance. This shift will represent part of BJS’s effort to respond to the challenge posed by the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics, which commented: BJS’s work in law enforcement is hindered by a sharp and overly restrictive focus on management and administrative issues; its analysis of law enforcement generally lacks direct connection to data on crime, much less providing the basis for assessing the quality and effectiveness of police programs. It is also in the area of law enforcement, with the proliferation of numerous special agency censuses and little semblance of a fixed schedule or interconnectedness of series, where the need for refining the conceptual framework for multiple data collections is most evident. The LECS will incorporate three of BJS’s core law enforcement programs: the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA), and the Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers (FLEO). The development and implementation of these collections will be guided by a framework that integrates concepts of police performance into an establishment survey context. As part of the LECS program, this 51-month project includes (1) fielding the LEMAS in 2016, (2) fielding a LEMAS supplement in 2017 on LEAs’ use of body-worn cameras, (3) fielding the CSLLEA and the FLEO in 2018, (4) developing and testing a set of LEMAS supplemental survey instruments, and (5) disseminating findings to the public through research reports and a BJS web-based analytic data tool.