Dashboards, Dashboards, Dashboards!

Introducing some new ways to analyze crime and policing data

I am a dashboard proponent because, when done right, they can be useful tools for analyzing a wide swath of important issues. My goal when building them is to make pretty data products that allow users to analyze data in multiple ways. Dashboards aren’t a cure-all for poor data though and at times they can be overused, ugly, and unhelpful in terms of increasing understanding of an issue.

With that in mind, I’ve got some exciting — nerdy exciting, not normal person exciting — dashboard updates. There are some changes to pre-existing dashboards, a new site for dashboards to live, and some new dashboards being introduced as well. Many of these dashboards are New Orleans-centric, but similar products in other cities would be extraordinarily useful for being able to cobble together a deeper understanding of crime and policing trends throughout the country.

Year-to-Date Murder Dashboard

The YTD Murder Dashboard launched last year and provides a comprehensive near real time collection of murder data in nearly a hundred US cities. This dashboard is frequently used by media, academic, and other sources to understand murder trends in big cities which tend to mimic the national murder trend.

To this we have added a new capability in the City Scorecard page. This new page allows a user to see a city’s murder totals this year versus last year and track that city’s murder total and rate from 1960 up to 2021. So everything you might want to know about New York City’s murder rate over the last 60 years is available for download with just a few clicks of a button.

We are still working some kinks out of this page so right now you can only download data for the 90+ cities that are included in the YTD murder counts. Eventually this page will include every city that reports data to the FBI. One note - data is only included for places that reported 12 months of data to the FBI in a year. So cities that did not report data to the FBI in 2021 via NIBRS or cities that missed a random year¹ will be missing a data point.

The New Orleans City Council dashboards

I have been working as a public safety consultant with the New Orleans City Council since 2018, and a good chunk of that work has revolved around building data products which can be used to explain the city’s Criminal Justice system. This comprehensive set of dashboards has now been expanded by four and has a new easy-to-use home at https://council.nola.gov/dashboards/. There are 10 total dashboards on that page covering topics on crime, policing, incarceration, and the courts.

First, the Crime Dashboard has been revamped. This was the first dashboard that I built for the Council and it has been updated to show the number incidents YTD (including murders) for this year compared to last 3 years. Before it was just this year versus last year, so this addition will allow for greater context when evaluating trends.

Response Time Dashboard

The Response Time Dashboard measures law enforcement response times to citizen generated Calls for Service. The surge in response times in New Orleans has been a major issue in 2022, and this dashboard was built to make sense of the problem.

Users can measure the average, median, or 90th percentile response time by day, month, or year since 2014. Users can break down response times by incident type or geographic location in case you want to see how long the average response time to a car accident in the French Quarter typically is — actually, you may not want to know².

You can also see trends such as the share of incident that are Gone On Arrival and how it relates to the length of response time as well as the share of incidents that take longer than 20 minutes to get a response per year. Finally, there is an analysis tab for better evaluating response times by time of day and day of week. Lots to see and learn from this dashboard.

Police Staffing

The NOPD Staffing dashboard evaluates NOPD’s commissioned strength today, recently, and over the last century. Like response times, staffing has become a major issue in 2022 as the department has lost 20 percent of its commissioned strength since 2019. This dashboard provides data on the number of officers per year back to 1930 thanks to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report³.

More granular data on the number of sworn officers and recruits is available since the start of 2006. This includes monthly data from 2006 to 2014, less frequent data available between 2015 and 2021, and weekly data in 2022 from NOPD's demographics dashboard. Digging deeper, users have the ability to see the number of recruit applicants per month to NOPD rolling over 12 months so you can evaluate how recruiting is going.

Traffic Stops

The Traffic Stops Dashboard looks at…well…traffic stops in New Orleans over the last decade. This dashboard uses NOPD’s publicly available Field Interview Card dataset to look at who is being stopped for traffic violations, where, and what is happening in these incidents.

Traffic stops in New Orleans fell off a cliff after a ransomware attack in December 2019 and they have generally stayed low over the last three years. There are tons of layers to explore and trends to analyze.

Policing Performance

The Policing Performance Dashboard probably needs a different name (ideas?), but it provides information on a handful of areas related to policing in New Orleans. First, this dashboard tracks the arrest rate for murders and non-fatal shootings for the last few years. The arrest rate is a formula showing the number of this year’s murders where an individual has been arrested under that item number divided by the number of murders counted this year. This is different from a clearance rate or a solve rate⁴, so while a murder-suicide will show as cleared or solved it will not show up as having an arrest.

The other part of this dashboard enables a deep dive on Calls for Service to law enforcement. With this feature you can track the different types of Calls for Service over time, when they occur by day of week and time of day, and a heat map of where they happen in the city.

1. Like New Orleans failing to report data for 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

2. It’s 182 minutes so far this year.

3. A handful of years are missing and were filled in either by estimating or through NOPD publicly available data.

4. A clearance rate formula differs in that the numerator is the number of murders cleared by arrest or exception (like in the murder-suicide) for murders that occurred in any year divided by the number of murders that occurred in that year. A solve rate is typically an internal metric which includes murders that are cleared by warrant but where the suspect has not yet been located.