Featured article for Chief of PolicePublic Safety in the Real Time City: Data Driven Policing

Two weeks ago, a large fire occurred in a warehouse complex in the waterfront district. While the city’s emergency management and fire departments worked to extinguish the fire, the city’s Chief of Police was also hard at work.  Apart from helping to evacuate the area around the scene, there was a question around whether the fire was an accident or the result of criminal activity.  Later in the week, this reporter had a chance to interview the Chief.

Q: The Chief of Police is frequently the community focal point when a significant public safety incident happens.  This is often when you make a statement.  But the public rarely gets a glimpse into all the things you do behind the scenes.  What’s your role in an event such as the warehouse fire?

A: In the warehouse fire, or really any type of public safety situation, my primary responsibility is to protect the community.   This could mean evacuating people from dangerous areas, like we did for that fire.  And it also means investigation.  I need to figure out what, if any, criminal activity is associated with any given public safety incident.

Q: So what’s the biggest challenge that you face?

A: Honestly, it’s resources, which correlates to budget of course.   My budget determines what resources I can deploy to protect the community and cover the everyday public safety needs of the city as well as respond to emergencies like the warehouse fire.   Budgets are finite and I always feel I never have enough resources to cover all of the contingencies I face.  So my every day challenge comes down to making decisions about how to best use my resources – my people, technology, funding, etc. -- most effectively.

Q: Information and decision making sound like they’re close to the heart of your role.  Does technology help you do your job better? 

A: Technology has changed the way I work in lots of ways and that change is for the better.  For example, through some of our systems, I have access to a variety of data that provides much better situational awareness for me… and it’s close to real-time.  When I can get information and understand it faster, then I can act on it rapidly.  It also helps my division commanders collaborate and share analysis.  As needed, it helps monitor and track mission details around an event or emergency like that warehouse fire, so that I can make smart decisions on who and what to deploy, and when and where to deploy them.   

Q:  Beyond helping you manage the immediate response to the fire better, how else are you using technology?

A: Well, we also have information systems that help officers, detectives and analysts work on investigations…like the one going on to try to figure out if the warehouse fire was intentionally set or not.  At the scene, my officers interviewed several witnesses and collected data.  Later they reviewed video from public cameras in the area, as well as some footage from officer body worn cameras that was collected around the time the fire was set.  They even analyzed social media from the time around when the fire was first reported.  This generated a lot of data and the investigative team used our technology to organize and search through all this data quickly, using several different criteria. The team also searched information databases and was able to find connections to a similar warehouse fire last month in another jurisdiction.

When we’re investigating any suspicious or criminal activity, technology helps because tactical leads are generated faster.  The quality of the evidence gathered is also better because in the data, relationships can be established:  we connect the dots more easily, and make all this evidence, and our conclusions, available to the courts.  

Q:  How does this help reduce crime?

A:  It helps reduce crime because we can do more work, better and faster.  For incidents like that warehouse fire, the technology helped us to visualize data gathered in the warehouse vicinity on interactive dashboards and maps.  We analyzed the video data with time sequence playbacks.  We centralized all this data in one system and that enabled my officers to unearth nuggets they may have otherwise missed.  And, we can share our data and work across the department and with other jurisdictions with the confidence that the data is encrypted and secure. 

Q:  Does the technology make the community any safer?

A:  It makes the community safer because it keeps officers on the streets.  Some of the capabilities the technology enables are mobile, so my officers have access to information in their squad cars, or on their mobile devices.   All in all,  they are spending more time on the streets and less at their desks – which is one way I know that I am using them more effectively.  The technology is a force multiplier so my officers can do more. It all goes back to solving my number one challenge:  using my resources as efficiently as possible to do the best job I can to protect the community.

Q:  It sounds like you’re convinced of the utility of the technology.  Did it take you long to adopt it?

A: I was skeptical of some of the systems at first.  Using them seemed like more work, not less, and in public safety there is little to no time for errors.  But now that we are through the learning curve, I see that what the technology gives me is more information than I ever had before.  And while it can’t make decisions for me, I use it with confidence to support my decisions.  Making smart decisions is the heart of the job and the systems we have today help in lots of ways including when I and my commander staff are reacting quickly to emergencies and when we need to use data forensically to help speed up investigations and also using key analytics to help better plan for resources. And at the end of the day, that’s how we best serve our community.

This article was written to discuss how big data management and analytics enables Chiefs of Police do their jobs better.  The city and Chief of Police in the article are fictitious, but the author thanks IBM’s Corky Jewell, Retired Major at Georgia State Patrol, for his insight and guidance about some of the challenges that Chiefs of Police face on a daily basis, and how analytics technology helps them to meet them.