Washington — A growing movement to grant criminal justice researchers statutory access to agency data is gaining traction in state legislatures, as policymakers grapple with longstanding gaps that experts say undermine evidence-based public safety policy.
According to Governing, a news website that provides public officials with up-to-date policy and political news, the push represents a “practical, targeted response” to a significant problem that has long limited the ability of researchers and policymakers to analyze how the justice system actually functions.
Governing explains that “you cannot run an effective public safety system on guesswork. Every officer… every prosecutor… and every policymaker… already knows this. Evidence-based policy depends entirely on the quality and accessibility of underlying data.”
When policymakers are left with data that is “siloed, delayed or simply unavailable to researchers,” they are “left flying blind on decisions that directly affect public safety.”
Because of this, Governing reports that “Tennessee lawmakers recently introduced one of the first bills modeled on the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) new Researcher Access to Data Act.”
The bill would require criminal justice agencies across the full spectrum — courts, law enforcement, corrections and supervision — to share data with qualified researchers who meet certain requirements.
Governing emphasizes that “the willingness to put researcher access into statute sends a clear signal: This is not a niche academic concern; it is a core public safety issue.”
The bill did not emerge in a vacuum; in 2025, Tennessee’s comptroller released a report on Shelby County’s criminal justice system that exposed the depth of the data problem in stark terms.
Governing states that in the report, “researchers found that the lack of a unique case identifier made it nearly impossible to track individuals as cases move through the court system from arrest to resolution.”
As a consequence, the county “could not reliably tell state auditors how long cases were taking to resolve, what percentage of defendants reoffended while awaiting trial or how charges changed between arrest and prosecution.”
Governing states that this is “not just a transparency failure — it is a public safety failure.”
Reflecting on police data transparency research, Governing concludes that it “has made clear that the absence of rigorous, accessible data does not just frustrate researchers — it erodes public trust in institutions that cannot demonstrate how they are performing.”
Data transparency, the outlet reports, is “one of the strongest tools law enforcement has to demonstrate professionalism and build the community trust that effective policing requires.”
The ALEC model policy, Governing claims, is “carefully designed to address the legitimate concerns on both sides of this debate.”
The policy “requires agencies to share data with ‘bona fide researchers’ — those with institutional review board approval, data security protocols and commitments that personally identifiable information will not be disclosed in published findings.”
The policy also “distinguishes between data already subject to public disclosure and more sensitive records, allowing discretionary sharing of the latter while mandating the former.”
Governing emphasizes that “these safeguards matter” because “agency resistance to researcher access is sometimes rooted in legitimate privacy concerns, and that deserves to be taken seriously.”
On the other hand, Governing remarks that “resistance is also sometimes a way to avoid accountability, and a statute with clear standards and institutional safeguards removes the pretextual objections while preserving the genuine ones.”
Governing also discusses how “structural barriers to research access are also real and should not be underestimated.”
Decentralized data systems, inconsistent standards and a lack of documentation often prevent even well-resourced researchers from obtaining usable data.
Additionally, “many court systems either do not allow bulk data downloads, charge prohibitive fees for access or use non-standardized fields that make cross-jurisdiction analysis nearly impossible.”
Governing explains that this can lead to “some counties sharing data readily while adjacent ones maintain near-total opacity.”
Governing reports that “the stakes are high.”
Communities across the country are making major resource decisions about policing, prosecution and incarceration with inadequate data about what is actually driving outcomes.
They also theorize that better and more accessible data could help address a long-standing problem reflected in public opinion polling.
“Public perception of crime often diverges sharply from what official data actually shows,” the outlet reports.
Governing remarks that research over decades has “established that evidence-based approaches to public safety produce superior outcomes precisely because they allow agencies to identify what works, adjust what does not, and demonstrate results to the communities they serve.”
The outlet also discusses how recent research on “state criminal justice priorities found that governors across the political spectrum are demanding better performance measurement and data-driven decision-making from their criminal justice agencies.”
However, Governing reports that the data infrastructure necessary to support those demands often does not exist.
These bills and policies “represent a serious framework for expanding researcher access in a way that protects privacy, maintains agency accountability and strengthens the evidence base for public safety decisions.”
Governing emphasizes that “without clear statutory requirements, the inertia of fragmented, inaccessible data systems tends to win.”
The outlet concludes that “criminal justice progress built on advocacy without evidence is not progress — it is politics.”
“Other states now have a model,” Governing states. “They should use it.”
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