Criminal justice research often requires conversion of free-text offense descriptions into overall charge categories to aid analysis. For example, the free-text offense of "eluding a police vehicle" would be coded to a charge category of "Obstruction - Law Enforcement". Since free-text offense descriptions aren't standardized and often need to be categorized in large volumes, this can result in a manual and time intensive process for researchers. ROTA is a machine learning model for converting offense text into offense codes.

Currently ROTA predicts the Charge Category of a given offense text. A charge category is one of the headings for offense codes in the 2009 NCRP Codebook: Appendix F.

The model was trained on publicly available data from a crosswalk containing offenses from all 50 states combined with three additional hand-labeled offense text datasets.

For more information on the model, please see the model repo.

This model and application were developed by the RTI International Center for Data Science.