EVERETT—Washington State University’s (WSU) Everett Campus is currently beta testing a new, state of the art, public safety data center that, when it launches this fall, will be the nation’s first ever publicly accessible portal that collects, organizes, and delivers information related to all things public safety across Washington.
The program is an effort to “democratize data,” Dr. David Makin, Associate Professor at WSU’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, informed the Lynnwood Times. By “democratizing data,” he means to make data useful for communities.
While several tools, that compile police data already exist, including the WASPC’s annual reports, and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the data in which these reports encompass are arrest-based. The totality of what a police agency does, however, revolves around far more than just making arrests.
“We work with law enforcement agencies where about 10 percent of what they do is making arrests,” Dr. Makin told the Lynnwood Times. “It’s not the inability to be transparent, it’s how can you bring all of this data together so that people can see what public safety looks like; discover what’s working and what might not be working in a community.”
What’s more, many reports—such as the WASPC annual crime report—are published annually meaning if a data-based decision needs to be made immediately you would need to wait a whole year until that report was published to assess its findings. Dr. Makin’s program could make data available weekly.
Solely focusing on arrest-based data can skew the public’s perspective on law enforcement agencies and what they do but it can also affect how a law enforcement operates, Dr. Makin continued. For example, if a city’s crime rates are going down and a police department approaches a City Manager for more funds to hire more police officers the city may look at arrest data and think it’s unnecessary. The reality may be, however, that police officers are conducting more non-arrest-related calls such as mental health-related contacts or welfare checks, both of which are not represented in current publicly available data reports.
“As much as we talk about transparency, and policing, and law enforcement, it really is about true transparency – understanding how, and what the police do, and making that available to the public so that we can discover what’s working and what’s not,” said Dr. Makin. “As we make changes in policing, such as policy, where things are not becoming arrestable offenses that doesn’t mean the police are not involved, or responding in some way, those contacts. If we’re really going to address some of the misperceptions of what the police do, we need to bring data to bear to have an honest conversation about what they are doing.”
He went on to share that pulling all incident data instead of only arrests would generate better statistics.
“In our state we have cities whose daytime population is three times higher than its live-in population, so if you use ‘use of force rates’ based on this census that’s a disingenuous comparison because their [law enforcement] contacts are so much higher,” said Dr. Makin. “Our ability to use police incident data allows us to generate better per contact, or per incident, rates.”
The data center is currently in its beta testing phase and Dr. Makin’s team hopes to have some data available by late this fall. When it launches community members will be able to set up an account (to save configurations and share with other users), log in to a website, and download complete data sets with the exception of some redactions to protect the privacy of officers and the people with whom they interact.
“It’s about maximizing teaching, research, and service,” said Dr. Makin.
The website will be based on an intelligent dashboard model where if users are unsure what exactly they’re looking for, they can simply query the system. The goal is to make the information as accessible as possible and the Center for Interdisciplinary Statistical Education and Research (CISER), an outreach mechanism for the university, will even be available to answer any questions.
The project is being funded by Washington State Senate Bill 5259, concerning law enforcement data collection, which was signed into law by Governor Inslee on May 18, 2021.
Following the George Floyd incident in 2020, Dr. Makin received an email from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office asking two questions: if he was to be able to build a use of force data collection system and two, how much would it cost? Dr. Makin replied that if he were to create a passive system—meaning all the data is law enforcement supplied—and his team’s role would simply compile the data into information for the public, then it wouldn’t be financially doable.
“It’s transparency without any accountability or mechanisms,” said Dr. Makin.
Dr. Makin then worked with Dr. Matt Hickman, from Seattle University, with stakeholders while the legislature worked on the bill that would eventually fund the project. Dr. Makin’s responsibilities, through WSU, then became creating the architecture, the research plan, and the necessary partnerships (Seattle University and various technology partners) and as of August 2021, WSU became the official data custodians for the project.
Dr. Makin has spent his entire career working with law enforcement agencies and noticed that these agencies typically go through a third-party vendor to create and manage their data collection system, which makes it difficult for that agency to timely extract the data. For example, if an agency wants to refer to incidents where drugs were present, which many needed to do following the state’s Blake Decision in 2021, it took six to nine months, in some cases, to get reliable data.
“We saw more and more agencies were not able to operationalize their data – it’s your data but is it really your data?” said Dr. Makin. “That was the moment when we began our conversation, internally at WSU, on if we’re going to apply to be the data custodians for this project, what should it look like? I was adamant that if we only built a use of force data collection program, like New Jersey has built, and other states, that would be a disservice because all we’d capture is how many? We would not get the context; we would have no conceptualizing of what’s working and what’s not in this state. But if we could get police incident data, at the same cost, we could help every single police department modernize.”
Dr. Makin continued that some police agencies simply don’t have the staff and resources to release annual reports.
Dr. Makin will be delivering a speaker series event on March 28, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., at Washington State University’s Everett campus, highlighting how community members can use open data to make informed decisions, improve relationships, and work together for a safer future, as well as going over this new program in further detail.
To register to attend that event visit: https://everett.wsu.edu/everett-empowered/.
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