The use of timely and accurate localized data to drive law enforcement operations toward more efficient and effective resource deployment is the benchmark for 21st-century policing.1
For today’s law enforcement and public safety chief executives, high-quality, detailed data is paramount for effective decision making. In addition to open source data, law enforcement agencies have records management systems (RMS), incident-based reporting systems, and information sharing tools that provide data on crime incidents, suspects, victims, and arrests. Together, these resources can be assessed to identify local and regional trends, to effectively deploy resources, and to support data-driven policing initiatives. In today’s environment when agencies are confronting budgetary and staffing challenges, it is especially important that law enforcement executives continually leverage data to improve and expand decision making and to maximize available resources.
What Are Incident Data and How Can They Help an Agency?
High-quality incident data in law enforcement require accuracy, completeness, timely completion, adequate levels of detail, the ability to be catalogued and recalled, and ease of analysis. This generally consists of the details regarding the crimes committed, victims, offenders, suspects, locations, the nature of any injuries, and property taken or destroyed. Incident data can also include supplemental reports and statements made by victims and bystanders, investigative notes, and inventories of evidence. Since all of these items tend to be gathered at the scene, law enforcement data are most likely to be accurate, complete, and timely at the moment they are initially recorded by the responding officer or dispatcher. First responders will likely have the best information regarding a particular incident or investigation. While records division staff are able to implement quality assurance to the particulars of the data entry requirements, they may unintentionally create inaccurate changes. It is therefore imperative that those performing the initial data entry be as accurate and detailed as possible.
