The call came in just after 9 a.m., one of dozens that would flood Alex Piquero’s office at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) that day.
Attorney General Merrick Garland would be delivering remarks later that day and needed verification on crime-related data he would be citing in his remarks. So, Piquero and his team of statisticians moved quickly, verifying the information well before the start of the attorney general’s news conference.
“It was all part of a day’s work,” Piquero, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, recalled of his recent stint as director of BJS, the primary statistical agency of the Department of Justice that collects, analyzes, and publishes data on all things crime—from criminal offenders and victims to identity theft and criminal justice expenditures.
“Every day was something new and exciting,” he said. “There were days when we’d work well past 1 o’clock in the morning, and there were days when I would get well over a hundred emails that required answers.”
For Piquero—who in more than two decades of conducting research has wielded stats to prove such harsh realities as rising rates of gun violence in American inner cities—the position was tailor-made. “One where I didn’t have any political horse in the race,” he explained. “I was just doing the business of tabulating and releasing data to the American public for their own use for whatever reason.”
Appointed by President Joe Biden, Piquero served a one-year term. He returned to the University last semester because he yearned for what he calls “that magical experience” that shapes his academic essence: teaching, mentoring, and conducting research. “I missed the classroom, that instantaneous, live interaction with students,” he said.
But while his stay in the nation’s capital may have been brief, he accomplished much, spearheading the launch of a new BJS visualization tool and report series—Just the Stats—which displays information and key crime and justice data in an easy-to-read format. He also hit the road to talk about the importance and relevance of the data the agency produced.
“Like every government agency, BJS releases very long reports. But the world right now is digesting information on their phones in 5 to 10 seconds,” Piquero said. “I wanted to make BJS relevant to the way the world was digesting information. So, I challenged our BJS team to translate the work we were doing instantaneously so that people could literally interact with the data on their cellphones. We started to release these abbreviated reports that could be literally read in three minutes. They include a title and a figure or table below it.”
The first Just the Stats item produced by Piquero’s team: a report on carjacking victimization rates. Through easy-to-read statistics and tables, it revealed that the crime had declined nationwide by more than 78 percent since 1995. “Carjacking is top-of-mind for a lot of people,” Piquero said. “But at the time we released our report on it, there had never been a national data feature on it.”
People, Piquero explained, use data in different ways, and the carjacking report his team produced is evidence of that. “The data can be used by researchers who want to study trends over time—a simply academic pursuit of things. A policymaker might go, ‘Well, we need to spend money in law enforcement to attend to carjacking.’ Or police departments might look at the data and decide to create specialized units. But if they don’t have the data to know what is going on, they may be making incorrect decisions.”
More than 1,800 people signed up for Just the Stats on the day the carjacking report went live, according to Piquero. “We had senators and their aides reaching out to us to express how glad they were that we were producing these kinds of short and timely reports,” he said.
During his BJS stint, Piquero, as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to ramp up accountability in policing, also cowrote a report on what needs to be done to improve crime and justice data, delivering that report to the White House on the third anniversary of the George Floyd killing. Piquero also helped ramp up diversity within the BJS ranks, hiring and promoting more women and people of color who, he said, will continue to lead the agency in years to come.
He called his service “humbling—an incredible honor for the son of two parents who fled Cuba in the early 1960s as teenagers. And being able to give remarks at the White House for the administration’s Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics, was a personally rewarding moment.”
Since his return to the University, Piquero has used his experiences at BJS to augment his teaching. “My students are so interested in what I did in Washington and what I learned, and I’m able to open up a lot of the boxes for them,” said Piquero, who is also Arts and Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University. “Many of them aspire to go into public service, some want to go into law. But whatever it is, I’m now able to give them a perspective of our government from someone who has been a presidential appointee and is now teaching their class.”
