Crimereports & SJPD
Data-driven decision making for small and medium-sized law enforcement agencies


Background: Big-budgeted police agencies like the NYPD and LAPD pioneered the use of real-time data to guide decision-making and resource allocation. Medium-sized agencies like San Jose, CA and Mesa, AZ had the desire to emulate the NYPD's data-driven approach, but neither the budget nor tech expertise. Public Engines' flagship product, crimeports.com, had integrations in to import up-to-date data on crime activity, but was focused on sharing and mapping crime data with the general public.
Problem: Law enforcement agencies wanted a system like CompStat, the analytics-based methodology pioneered by the NYPD, but lacked the infrastructure or capability to aggregate, analyze, and map the crime data that their electronic records contained.
Solution: I consulted closely with crime analysis experts within the San Jose and Mesa police departments, and studied the CompStat methodologies and tools that NYPD and LAPD had developed. We identified the most crucial and easiest-to-emulate features and developed a stripped-down SaaS tool that met the agencies' needs. Over the course of many iterations, the toolset eventually fulfilled the agencies' full requirements, and eventually more than half of law enforcement agencies in the United States had adopted the platform.
This solution is now the backbone of Motorola’s Intelligence-led public safety offering.