SAN ANTONIO — Now you can track crime in San Antonio like never before. The city along with SAPD released a new Public Safety Dashboard. The dashboard allows you to track the biggest crimes happening in your zip code or service area, as well as the time it takes officers to respond.
For now, the new dashboard is filled with data from the start of this year up until the end of September.
Police Chief William McManus said this has been a long time coming.
“People are hungry for data,” he said.
Director of Integrated Community Safety Maria Vargas-Yates said this has been a project the city has been working on for over a year.
"The city saw the need for us to do that,” she said. "Some of the key aspects of having a fair equitable law enforcement agency, or criminal justice system is knowing what's going on or having access to that information."
Just this summer, Vargas-Yates said they tested this project with people in every district across San Antonio.
“We didn't want to direct a narrative,” she said. “We didn't want to filter things out. We wanted to share as much as we could, and it is a lot."
As for the dashboard, it has different categories and subcategories. The first main category is Calls of Service Data, which includes Demand, Problem & Response, and Reporting.
In this category you can zone in on your zip code and find out how many times police have been called and what is the top crime happening in your area, among other factors.
The other main category is Offense/Report Data, followed by Offense Reports and Arrests. For example, this can track how many times an arrests was made.
Below are a few bullet points, the city provided, on what exactly you can discover using the new dashboard.
What can you discover?
• What types of calls for service take place in their Police Service Area or their Zip Code
• How the Police respond to calls for service in their Police Service Area or their Zip Code
• Response times
• Outcomes/Dispositions (what did officers do in response to calls for service)
• Where arrests are taking place and what charges individuals are being arrested for
• Where alleged offenses are taking place, as well as breakdowns of the different types of offenses
• Trends in when people call the Police by day or by time of day
“I want more people to be aware of the state of public safety in the city,” she said. “And be more aware of what SAPD is doing for them."
The dashboard even allows you to input certain filters like narrowing it down by time frame or by crimes. Chief McManus said this new tool is state-of the-art. He said this is important because of transparency.
“It provides that transparency that a lot of people are looking for, and the transparency that we want them to have,” he said. “They can come away with a much better idea of what the officers are doing for them."
Chief McManus said now that numbers are out there, the other part of the equation is the follow-up. He said this is a big focus for the police department.
“As we see the numbers ticking up in a particular area for a particular offense, or a particular issue that may be problematic in a certain neighborhood, we will assign a certain unit to deal with depending on what the issue this,” the chief said.
As for the data, it will refresh every month. Vargas-Yates said this data paints the most accurate picture of what is happening in San Antonio. She said users can even download the raw data if they want to take it a step further.
Vargas-Yates said she encourages people to utilize this tool, as this data was once a hassle to obtain.
"You can't break it,” she said.
The city said this is just the beginning and plans to add even more features by next year. Vargas-Yates said they are also working on dashboards for the San Antonio Fire Department and the Good Neighbor Program.