The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is seeking applications for funding for the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) Supplemental Survey.
Donor Name: Bureau of Justice Statistics
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 06/23/2022
Size of the Grant: $700,000
Grant Duration: 27 months
Details:
The FY 2022 noncompetitive award for the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) Supplemental Survey will provide funding from October 1, 2022 to December 31, 2024. The LEMAS survey, conducted every 3 to 4 years since 1987, is based on a nationally representative sample of approximately 3,500 agencies and provides national estimates of law enforcement salaries, expenditures, operations, equipment, information systems, and policies and procedures.
In addition to these regular core surveys, BJS also fields LEMAS supplemental surveys to capture detailed information on specific issues in law enforcement. The first LEMAS supplemental survey, which focused on law enforcement use of body-worn cameras, was fielded in 2017. Funding under this new noncompetitive award will support the development and fielding of a two-topic LEMAS supplemental survey in FY 2023, with the two topics being (1) post-academy law enforcement training and (2) organizational responses related to police suicide
Goals
Funding will support the following goals to do the following:
- develop a two-topic LEMAS supplemental survey in FY 2023, with the two topics being (1) post-academy law enforcement training and (2) organizational responses related to police suicides
- field the LEMAS supplemental survey with data collection, starting in fall of 2023
- process LEMAS supplemental survey data, to include any needed nonresponse, weighting, and/or imputation
- provide to BJS deliverables that allow for generation of nationally representative statistics on post-academy training and organizational responses to police suicide among law enforcement agencies in the United States.
Objectives
Funding will support the following objectives:
- Survey Management
- routine management activities (e.g., schedule and budget updates) associated with conducting the LEMAS supplemental survey
- to work with BJS to prepare a generic clearance request to cognitively test police welfare and wellbeing questions
- to prepare text for Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Paperwork Reduction Act Clearance Parts A and B and appendix materials for the OMB clearance request
- regular meetings of assigned staff (i.e., statisticians, survey specialists, programmers) prior to and during the data collection period to discuss schedule, budget, staffing, and other issues related to the LEMAS supplemental survey
- to produce memos documenting key decision points throughout the scope of the award.
- Frame Development
- To use the Law Enforcement Agency Roster (LEAR) to serve as the sampling frame for the LEMAS supplement. The LEAR is a regularly updated and validated roster of law enforcement agencies in the United States.
- Frame development and stratification, including identification of active, publicly funded primary state agencies, sheriffs’ offices, and municipal, county, or regional police departments for the frame. Such agencies will be further filtered by full-time equivalent sworn personnel, allowing for two groups within the sample: selfrepresenting agencies selected from the frame with certainty into the sample and agencies to be selected in the sample through stratified random sampling.
- Instrument Development
- updating the content and design of the LEMAS supplemental survey, including cognitive interviews and question development for any activity associated with police suicide questions or survey programming
- development of programming specifications, program, and testing for the web and Teleform surveys
- program non response and data quality phone follow-up applications, with the goal of prompting non respondents to complete the LEMAS supplement online or with Teleform
- data quality follow-up to include development of system-generated email messages listing items/issues to be resolved (for simple issues) and system-generated email messages informing the respondent that an interviewer will call to resolve issues (for complex issues)
- programming to provide the interviewers with case-specific reports detailing the issues to be resolved
- creation of case-specific reports detailing the issues to be resolved.
- Data Collection
- fielding the LEMAS supplemental survey, starting in fall of 2023, with the data collection period lasting approximately 7 months and an anticipated final response rate of at least 80 percent
- development of training materials and protocols for all staff assigned to provide survey assistance (e.g., help desk) and/or interviews with respondents (e.g. for nonresponse or data quality follow up)
- creation and assignment of case-specific user IDs and passwords for the online survey
- operation of a help desk (phone and email) throughout the data collection period
- development and execution of a planned communications schedule, to include prenotifications, survey invitation, multi-mode reminder waves (e.g., email, hard copy mailings), nonresponse calling, end of study notifications, and hard copy thank you letters mailed throughout the collection period
- development and execution of a data quality plan following survey submission.
Funding Information
- Award Ceiling: $700,000
- Award Floor: $350,000
- Period of performance duration: 27 months
Eligibility Criteria
RTI International To advance Executive Order 13929 Safe Policing for Safe Communities, the Attorney General determined that all state, local, and university or college law enforcement agencies must be certified by an approved independent credentialing body or have started the certification process to be eligible for FY 2022 DOJ discretionary grant funding. To become certified, the law enforcement agency must meet two mandatory conditions: (1) the agency’s use-of-force policies adhere to all applicable federal, state, and local laws and (2) the agency’s use-of-force policies prohibit chokeholds except in situations where use of deadly force is allowed by law. The certification requirement also applies to law enforcement agencies receiving DOJ discretionary grant funding through a subaward.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
