Okay everyone.

We're gonna go ahead and get started.

We've got a form.

So I'll call this into order for three case meeting.

We've got a presentation from CPD and she should be able to leave your kicking this off.

Hi everybody.

So I think all of you know most of our command staff, but just in case you don't, we do have some new faces, and so um I'm gonna have them introduce themselves really quick and tell you what they're in charge of.

Yeah.

Uh Max doesn't have the sheet.

So I have the second time she's shown available, then I start by that one.

My name is Drake Correll.

I'm over with Federal Standards Bureau, and I have uh the Academy, uh policy, the PIOs, yeah.

Everybody wants Rick's job.

And I'm Mark Fischer, uh, so I'm over our patrol bureau.

I'm over our investigative bureau, so I have all our criminal investigation and also special investigations, which is narcotic street crimes, squat, etc.

Assistant chief hunter couldn't be here tonight, but he is over kind of our uh patrol support operations, so things like our park police, our homeless outreach team, our school resource officers, special events, things of that nature.

So we have this great online data tool that we've been working hard to refine.

I think there's still some refinements we'd like to do to it.

So feel free to jot down suggestions or things because we'll definitely take those into consideration.

But uh assistant chief is general is going to talk to you in depth and answer questions about how best to use the tool and a lot of the you're gonna hear hear the word nuance a lot.

So just be prepared for that.

And um, I think it your preference, but I think it's easy.

Yeah, it's they they want to choose a microphone.

It'd probably be easier if you guys ask questions as they come up because it is gonna get really confusing.

Probably if you don't councilman Foster, we have about an hour, a little under an hour for this.

Is that I wasn't given an amount of chance.

That should be the trick.

Okay.

So uh, because we can get as far deep into the weeds as you folks want to go uh on this.

Um, but please, I hope this will be a little bit more of a conversation than uh um really kind of instructional training deal.

So uh to start out with uh the the packet that I that are the papers I provided you here is is just summary of all of the talking points I kind of wanted to make.

Um I thought about just giving you kind of like cheat sheets to walk away from with just some of the definitions, um, but then I ended up just giving you everything so that way you guys have some notes to refer back to at some point if that's if that's valuable for you.

So um I thought we'd go through like kind of crime stats generally from the police's perspective, then get into uh the history of crime reporting because I think that that talks a little bit about why some of the way things are counted the way they are.

Um, go into our crime data dashboard, which is really the focus of this is uh I was asked to kind of give some instruction on how to use this crime data dashboard and to so you can look at it yourselves or give guidance in that in that regard.

Um, and then um just some kind of takeaways or recommendations I have with the crime data.

So the first thing I want to kind of just start out with by saying is that defining the terms is everything for us.

Um that when the terms are undefined, um, you're gonna get different answers to the same question because we're defining the terms differently.

So the easiest way or the best example that I think that I can come up with is our calls for service data.

So somebody says, hey, how many calls for service is the Columbia Police Department respond on in a year?

It's like, well, that's that's a great question, but calls for service is still too much of an undefined term.

That calls for service could mean calls where a citizen calls 911 or 311 requesting a police officer to come.

Um it could include self-initiated contacts, uh, which means like traffic stops, is the traffic stop count for calls for service.

Well, it depends on how you define the term.

Um, or some of the other things like our following up, evidence processing, um, report writing, some administrative tasks.

Does that count as for a calls for service?

And so when somebody asks the police department how many calls for service did you go on, um, and we say 90,000 calls for service in the last 12 months, 116,000 or 124,000, those all could be accurate numbers, but it defend depends on how you define the term call for service.

So another thing that's gonna come up with this data dashboard too is that there's conflicting priorities when presenting and examining data.

So the Columbia Police Department has hundreds of thousands of records um that we we utilize uh you know from a year year to year basis.

So the Columbia Police Department has hundreds of thousands of records that we we utilize uh you know from a year year to year basis, and if we just gave you all of those in an Excel document, like or a or a CSV file or some sort of database file, that's gonna be very hard to ingest and to examine.

And so when we publish the data in this data dashboard, we had to make choices on how to present the data.

And so the two conflicting problems with our transparency dashboard is the the issue of if do you map every offense or do you map every incident?

And we define an incident as like a single, a single event.

Um, so somebody, let's say we get called to a house and it's domestic disturbance, but there's also a child abuse um and drugs that are at that.

So that's one incident, but there might be three or four different offenses.

And so when we map the data, um, and do you map just the the incident or do you map the offense?

And if you map the offense, it might look like when you're looking at the map data that there were this a really bad street.

You know, there was 10 crimes that occurred here in the last day or the last two weeks or whatever the time frame that you're looking at.

When it when reality it was one police incident, and so what you'll see on the transparency dashboard is that we've prioritized incidents over offenses, and that affects the crime data as you're looking at it.

Um the other thing when it has to do with crime data when you're looking at it, is there's preferences and how to consume the data.

So when we we'll get deep into the or deeper into the weeds about what's a crime against society, what's a crime against property, and what's a crime against um a person.