Portland Oregon's Crime Map improves transparency and community engagement around public safety
How Portland is improving transparency, accountability, and community engagement with its new, interactive crime map.
Highlights
Portland’s the new crime map gives citizens a user-friendly way to view and analyze data on reported crimes throughout the city.
Extensive filter options make it easy to see which types of crimes are most common in which neighborhoods.
The crime map is designed to improve transparency while simultaneously boosting citizen engagement with the Portland Police Bureau.
Summary
As part of its ongoing transparency initiative, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) launched a new dashboard that show citizens where crimes have been reported. $ The interactive map$ is updated each month, and contains data dating back to 2015.
With a variety of filters, residents can use the map to see which types of crime are most prevalent in which areas of the city. That said, the tool is not intended to name and shame particular neighborhoods. Rather, it is designed as a stand-alone resource to present open data – empowering citizens to analyze the information for themselves.
The interactive dashboard offers a far more user-friendly way to explore open data on crimes. The most obvious benefit of the new tool is the improved transparency that it provides. Additionally, the city expects the crime map to boost community engagement with PPB; and it is excited to see what uses citizens find for the data. The dashboard may even help officers and local neighborhood watch groups create improved, evidenced-based crime strategies.
Looking to the future, PPB intends to include additional information in the dashboard, such as statistics on use-of-force incidents and officer-involved shootings. The city hopes that by visualizing this data, it might be able to develop new strategies to reduce the need for such incidents in the future.