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NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research

Making NSW Sentencing Data Easier to Explore

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research

Deepend designed a public sentencing data visualisation tool for BOCSAR that makes NSW court sentencing trends easier to explore while protecting sensitive information through aggregation and suppression logic

Client: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) 

Industry: Government, Justice, Research, Data

Services: Human & Machine Experience Design; Content, Visibility and Analytics; Digital Transformation & Strategy

Target Audiences: Government policy makers, media, researchers, consumers and users ranging from data novices to experienced statisticians.

Year: 2020

I'm really pleased with the finished product we achieved through our engagement with Deepend. The Sentencing Tool significantly increases public access to information about court processes, provides a valuable resource for policy makers and stakeholders within the justice system and generally greatly improves transparency of the criminal justice system. All this in an intuitive and user friendly format!

Jackie Fitzgerald - Executive Director, BOCSAR

Overview

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) is a subdivision of the Department of Communities and Justice and is responsible for the processing and publication of data regarding the performance of the Justice system in NSW. In line with their internal charter to become more consumer focused, they have been driving the development of a number of innovative interactive tools, allowing external users to interact with the data sets that they collate.

The first of these tools to be developed focused on the visualising of data pertaining to Criminal Court Sentencing Data. The application presents data on court sentences imposed on offenders having proven court appearances in the NSW Local and Higher Courts.

Sentence information is provided across three levels of offence classifications (grouped by the Australian and New Zealand Offence Classification groups), and allows users to apply a number of filters to view sentencing outcomes specific to their data and information needs, including offender age bracket, Gender, whether the offender had any prior convictions, and whether the offender had served any time in prison previously.

Deepend began with an immersion phase involving stakeholder and user interviews across government, media and consumer audiences. 

These insights shaped the layout, filters and presentation model, including graphical and tabular views designed for both high-level exploration and deeper analysis.

The Challenge

  • BOCSAR publishes data about the performance of the NSW justice system. Its consumer-focused strategy created a need for tools that let external users explore complex datasets directly. 
  • The sentencing dataset had to serve users with very different levels of statistical confidence while protecting sensitive information from disclosure. 

The Opportunity

  • A well-designed interactive tool could make sentencing trends more transparent and useful for policy makers, media, researchers and the public. 
  • The experience also offered an opportunity to establish a stronger benchmark for presenting justice-system data online. 

What We Delivered

  • Stakeholder and user research 
  • Audience needs analysis 
  • Information and interaction design 
  • Data visualisation design 
  • Graphical and tabular data views 
  • Cumulative filtering model 
  • Tableau Public implementation 
  • Sensitive-data suppression logic 
  • Public-facing sentencing data tool 

Impact

  • Made complex sentencing datasets easier to access and interpret 
  • Supported audiences ranging from data novices to experienced statisticians 
  • Improved public access to information about NSW court processes 
  • Created a reusable benchmark for presenting justice-system data 
  • Enabled deeper analysis through filters including age, gender, prior convictions and previous imprisonment 

Value and Impact

Audience

Catering to a broad audience set, from data novice to experienced statisticians, the tool provides for both high level and deep analysis.

Feedback

Initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, making complex data sets accessible and easily interpreted

Benchmark

The tool provides a benchmark for the presentation of Justice system data and will facilitate better policy decision making and reporting ongoing

Developed in their chosen data visualisation platform, Tableau Public, the tool is both polished and professional. The layout focusing on communicating an interconnected array of data, allowing the user to adjust and modify results via the use of several cumulative filters. This allows the user to drill down to specific data sub-sets that may be of interest when exploring specific hypotheses.

Problem & Insight

Sentencing data is valuable to policy makers and the public, but its complexity can make interpretation difficult without statistical expertise. 

Research showed that the tool needed to support both novice users seeking clear trends and expert users who wanted to interrogate specific subsets of data. 

Strategy & Experience Design

Deepend used stakeholder interviews to balance different end-user requirements. The interface combined visual summaries with tabular detail so users could move from overview to deeper analysis. 

Filtering was designed to be cumulative, allowing users to adjust offence classifications and demographic factors to test specific hypotheses. 

Technology & Delivery

The tool was developed in Tableau Public, BOCSAR's chosen data visualisation platform. 

Because the dataset contained sensitive information, only aggregated data was used. Suppression business logic prevented users from filtering down to results that could expose sensitive unit-level information. 

Results

The finished tool increased public access to court sentencing information and gave justice-sector stakeholders a more intuitive way to explore complex data. 

BOCSAR described the tool as improving transparency and providing a valuable resource for policy makers and other justice-system stakeholders.

Want to explore how Deepend can deliver similar results?

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