By Theodore Decker
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A panel studying gun violence in Ohio will meld data from police agencies and the prison system to determine who is most often responsible for the crimes and how to stop them from re-offending.
The Violent Crime with Guns Advisory Group was formed earlier this year by Attorney General Mike DeWine, who has called gun violence a scourge inflicted upon the state by a relatively few career criminals.
At the group’s regular monthly meeting yesterday, Ohio State University researcher Deanna Wilkinson revealed some preliminary data, cautioning that the numbers she has pulled from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s Computerized Criminal History database were not yet wholly reliable.
The database was designed primarily for police officers to look up a particular person, not for broad statistical analyses such as the one now under way, group members said.
Further data analysis from various state agencies should yield reliable details about not only offenders’ demographics but the outcomes of their brushes with the criminal-justice system, Wilkinson said.
“That’s going to tell us the profile of the people that frankly we have to go after,” DeWine said. “We want decisions that we make to be research-driven.”
“Prison space is at a premium,” said Jeff Welbaum, chief of DeWine’s criminal-justice section.
“What we’re trying to do is identify and incarcerate that most-dangerous offender,” he said.
Copyright 2011 The Columbus Dispatch