How Trump hides information about the judicial system and the crime data

Stored
12:00 p.m. Edt

05.03.2025

So far, the administration has reduced donations for the persecution of poor police officers, shootings and violent extremism, canceled grants to prevent crime and much more.

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The Trump administration quickly tries to redesign the American criminal justice system.

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi canceled hundreds of scholarships to the contraception of crime in order to shift their focus on the illegal enforcement of drugs and the extermination of the DEI guidelines. On Monday, the President signed executive commands to limit the reform of the police and the withdrawal of understanding of consent, and the police authorities are accountable. The most recent reporting indicates how the ministry's civil rights will pass from the enforcement of civil rights laws to impart cases against universities and cities, passed liberal politics and prompted hundreds of lawyers to withdraw in protest and to affect the department effectively.

But all the news about what these guidelines do Spoil quickly restricted public access to information about crime and criminal justice.

In the early days of the Trump presidency, government agencies began to delete websites, promoted “gender ideology” or diversity, justice and inclusion initiatives. As reported in the resource of the journalist, pages about gender -specific violence and structural racism were reflected and remain offline. The prison office has removed its “Handbook for Transgender perpetrators” from its website, in which guidelines for interaction were described with imprisoned transgender persons. In addition, an overview of definitions and data on hate crimes on the website of the National Institute of Justice is no longer accessible, although there are some of the materials on other Ministry of Justice websites.

Although every change may be a minor together, they disturb the understanding of the causes of violence, successful strategies for crime prevention and the working method of the penalty justice system. Ultimately, without access to this type of information, it becomes more difficult to hold the government for its policy in terms of police work and detention.

The information ecosystem was also not perfect under the bidges. Around 2020, changes in the method and bureaucratic transformation led to significantly less reporting on the custody, a problem that continued in the bidding presidency. In 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended the interchangeable systems for collecting crime data. The Marshall project reported that 6,000 out of 18,000 police authorities did not change in time and had left a gaping hole in a primary resource for national crime statistics.

However, the Trump government went beyond bureaucratic swallowing by actively hindering access to public information. In March, the White House removed advice that declared gun power as a public health problem and listed statistics on shootings. According to mother Jones, large layoffs in the centers for the control and prevention of diseases have threatened the future of the data sentence known as the “WISQars”, which has pursued information on violations and deaths of weapons and has become a critical resource for researchers.

Data acquisition is often the first step to tackle serious social problems. Take the question of the “wandering police officers” who are transferred between police authorities without being abuse or misconduct. In 2022, the Biden administration founded the database for the accountability of the national law enforcement authorities, a central location for police authorities to look for information on the federal law enforcement officer with criminal convictions and violations of misconduct. Trump departed the database in office on his first day. State and local agencies rely on tools like this to gain insights from other jurisdiction and compare the success of different programs, but this work is becoming increasingly difficult.

Federal authorities also eliminate research employees, lower the financing and elimination of grants that have built up a portfolio of knowledge of the criminal justice over time. There are only many examples of gun violence. In the Department of Homeland Security, civil servants cited a consulting committee to develop evidence -based best practice to prevent shootings. In the centers for the control and prevention of diseases, the research team, which studied weapons, was decimated by layoffs and lost about three quarters of its employees.

With regard to the financing cuts in the Ministry of Justice last week, the changes have far -reaching effects on researchers who try to better understand crime patterns and prevention strategies. An analysis of the list of the scholarships of the Ministry of Justice published by Reuters shows that at least 44 grants worth more than 47 million US dollars were planned for research projects, including research on youthful justice, violent extremism, abuse of elderly, political strategies and re -incorporation.

The Ministry of Justice also lowered all funds for the rape resource center. Before unanimously from the 2003 Congress, PREA passed the data acquisition on incidents of sexual attacks in prisons to identify ways to prevention. The law led the national institute of justice to finance the culture of the sexual violence study in prison, the largest ethnographic study of detained people who have ever been carried out, a long list of recommendations for prisons and prisons. The study showed that more than 9% of the detained people were aware of rape that was committed by a prison employee. Follow-up research projects are now due to the federal government's funding cuts.

In an apparent contradiction, the Trump government hopes to rationalize and promote data acquisition to crime rates. The execution regulations on Monday for police work included a mandate to “increase the investment in and the collection, distribution and uniformity of crime data across the jurisdiction”. Project 2025 – A conservative policy plan for the Trump Presidency – wrote positively in the national survey of the Ministry of Justice of the Ministry of Justice and said that civil servants should “prioritize and finance them sufficiently”. Trump has already implemented several recommendations for the 2025 project for the Ministry of Justice.

There are a number of organizations for the data and information that is now protected from a public perspective that restore races for access. The project on state supervision contains a searchable database with 160 in February offline offline examination documents in which alleged abuse of the Ministry of Homeland Security was documented. Harvard University has compiled data on health authorization and environmental justice and made the information available online. The data rescue project archives millions of records on youth behavior, education, covid-19 and more. There is also the Wayback machine, a easily accessible tool to find older versions of websites that have been changed or removed from the Internet since then. It offers users an option to archive websites as soon as they exist today.

Have you seen examples of how the data and research of the criminal justice system can change or share data as part of the Trump administration? Share them with Jill at jcastellano@themarshallproject.org.