Everett—Washington State University (WSU) Everett Campus is currently beta testing a new state-of-the-art public safety data center. When the data center opens this fall, it will be the nation’s first publicly accessible portal to collect, organize and distribute relevant information. General public safety throughout Washington.
The program is an effort to “democratize data,” Dr. David Makin, associate professor in the WSU School of Criminal Justice and Criminology, told the Lynwood Times. “Data democratization” means making data useful to communities.
Several tools already exist to compile police data, such as WASPC’s annual report and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), but the data contained in these reports is arrest-based. However, the job of police agencies is not just to make arrests.
“We work with law enforcement, and about 10 percent of their activity is arrests.” Dr. Makin told the Linwood Times. “It’s not that there’s no transparency, it’s how can we bring all this data together so that people understand what public safety looks like? What works well in the community? and discover what’s going wrong.”
Additionally, many reports, such as WASPC’s annual crime report, are published annually, so if you need to make data-based decisions immediately, you have to wait an entire day until the report is published and its results can be evaluated. You have to wait a year. Makin’s program could make the data available weekly.
Focusing solely on arrest-based data can distort the public’s view of law enforcement and its operations, Dr. Makin continued, but it can also impact how law enforcement operates. Ta. For example, if a city’s crime rate is declining and the police department asks the city manager for additional funds to hire more officers, the city looks at arrest data and deems it unnecessary. maybe. In reality, however, police officers may be making many calls unrelated to arrests, such as mental health calls and welfare checks, both of which are not reflected in currently available data reports. Not yet.
“As much as we talk about transparency, police, and law enforcement, it’s about true transparency, understanding how and what police are doing, and making that available to the public and understanding what they’re doing. It’s about being able to discover what works and what doesn’t.” said Dr Makin. “As we make changes to policy and other aspects of policing, the fact that things are not becoming arrestable offenses does not mean that the police are not involved or are not responding to those communications in some way. No. If we really want to address misconceptions about police work, we need to provide the data to have honest conversations about police work.”
He went on to share that capturing all incident data, not just arrests, would provide better statistics.
“Using a ‘use of force rate’ based on this census is a disingenuous comparison because there are cities in our state where the daytime population is three times the permanent population. [law enforcement] The number of contacts is much larger. ” said Dr Makin. “By using police incident data, we can improve rates per contact or per incident.”
The data center is currently in beta testing, and Makin’s team hopes to have data available by the end of this fall. Once this begins, community members can set up an account (to save and share configurations with others), log into the website, and make some edits to protect the privacy of officers and people. The complete dataset will be available for download. Who they interact with.
“It is important that we maximize our teaching, research and service.” said Dr Makin.
The website is based on an intelligent dashboard model, and if a user is not sure what exactly they are looking for, they can simply ask the system. The goal is to make information as accessible as possible, and the University’s outreach mechanism, the Center for Interdisciplinary Statistics Education and Research (CISER), is also available to answer any questions you may have.
This project is funded by Washington State Senate Bill 5259, Law Enforcement Data Collection, signed by Governor Inslee on May 18, 2021.
After the George Floyd incident in 2020, Dr. Makin received an email from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office asking two questions. How much would it cost to build a use-of-force data collection system? Dr. Makin says that if you create a passive system, meaning all the data comes from law enforcement, and his team’s role is simply to compile the data into information for the public, then I said it wasn’t financially viable.
“It’s transparency without accountability or mechanisms.” Dr. Makin said..
Dr. Makin then teamed up with Dr. Matt Hickman of Seattle University and worked with stakeholders while Congress worked to craft legislation that would ultimately fund the project. Dr. Makin’s responsibilities through WSU then became the creation of the architecture, research plan, and necessary partnerships (Seattle University and various technology partners), and as of August 2021, WSU became the official data custodian of the project. I did.
Dr. Makin has spent his entire career working with law enforcement agencies, which typically rely on third-party vendors to create and manage their data collection systems, so they can ensure that their data is delivered in a timely manner. I noticed that it was becoming difficult to extract the . For example, if an agency wants to cite incidents where drugs were present, which many agencies were required to do following the state’s Blake ruling in 2021, it took six to nine months to get reliable data. In some cases, it took months.
“We’re seeing more and more government agencies unable to operationalize their data. It’s your data, but is it really your data?” said Dr Makin. “That was the moment we started having conversations internally at WSU about what it should look like if we were to apply to be the data controller for this project. I was adamant that just building a data collection program would be a detriment because it would only collect a few people. You can’t understand the context. What works in this state and what does it do? But if we could get police incident data for the same cost, we could help modernize all police departments.”
Dr. Makin further stated that some police agencies simply do not have the staff and resources to release annual reports.
Dr. Makin will host a Speaker Series event on March 28th from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM on Washington State University’s Everett Campus to help community members make informed decisions and improve relationships. , highlighting how open data can be leveraged to work together for a safer society. Learn more about this new program.
To register for that event, visit https://everett.wsu.edu/everett-empowered/.
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