More Real-Time Policing Data Made Available to the Public
Oct 26, 2016
More Real-Time Policing Data Made Available to the Public
Cincinnati Police Department seeks to remain leader in transparency
CINCINNATI – Additional data sets just went live for external consumption on the City’s Open Data Portal. This is part of the City’s participation in the White House Police Data Initiative (PDI).
"Transparency is a core value and people have a right to know what their government is doing," said Mayor John Cranley. “Making this data publicly available increases transparency and I believe will reveal that we have the most professional police department in the country."
The new data include:
USE OF FORCE: The use of force can generally be defined as the means of compelling compliance or overcoming resistance to an officer’s command(s) in order to protect life or property or to take a person into custody. Types of force can include verbal, physical, chemical, impact, electronic, and firearm. Other definitions of the use of force in law enforcement may differ.
OFFICER INVOLVED SHOOTINGS: An Officer involved shooting (OIS) may be defined as the discharge of a firearm, which may include accidental and intentional discharges, by a police officer, whether on or off duty.
ASSAULTS ON OFFICERS: Broadly, Assaults on Officers may be defined as the assault of duly sworn city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement officers.
The City of Cincinnati will continue publishing the following data sets:
CALLS FOR SERVICE: All events captured in an agency’s Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system used to facilitate incident response.
INCIDENTS: Incidents are the records, of reported crimes, collated by an agency for management. Incidents are typically housed in a Records Management System (RMS) that stores agency-wide data about law enforcement operations.
The Office of Performance & Data Analytics (OPDA) worked closely with the Police Department (CPD) to compile, centralize, and automate the publication of these police datasets. OPDA’s data strategy, deployed citywide, ensures transparency and enhanced customer service through frequent publication of high quality data for public consumption while enhancing performance management.
So, what’s next?
Data related to arrests and traffic stops are being prepared for publication on the portal very soon. Once they are, we believe this will keep us on forefront in terms of transparency by providing accessible, real time policing data.
“When we created OPDA this is exactly the type of benefit we envisioned. We are proud to make this information available. This is about transparency and trust,” said City Manager Harry Black.
In compliance with privacy laws, all Public Safety datasets are anonymized and appropriately redacted prior to publication on the City of Cincinnati’s Open Data Portal. This means that for all public safety datasets: (1) the last two digits of all addresses have been replaced with “XX,” and in cases where there is a single digit street address, the entire address number is replaced with "X"; and (2) Latitude and Longitude have been randomly skewed to represent values within the same block area (but not the exact location) of the incident.
LINKS:
For more information on the White House Police Data Initiative:
- https://publicsafetydataportal.org/
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/05/18/launching-police-data-initiative
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/22/fact-sheet-white-house-police-data-initiative-highlights-new-commitments
Cincinnati’s Open Data Portal:
Use of Force Dataset:
Officer Involved Shootings:
Assaults on Officers: