Guided Tour of South Bend’s Updated Police Dashboards
This blog is also posted on South Bend’s Transparency & Performance Page.
The South Bend Police Department’s Transparency Hub has gone through some recent changes! This is a guided tour to walk you through these updates.
What is the Transparency Hub?
Created in 2016, the Transparency Hub is a continuously changing and improving page with the goal of providing a centralized location for valuable data and information on Police operations. The Transparency hub can be found here.
Changes to Police Dashboard
The updated Police Dashboard contains most of the same information but with a new look! The Assaulted Shootings table has simply been moved up to the top. Both tables have been made bigger for better visibility. The Service Summary table, however, no longer has the following columns:
- Total Community Complaints
- % Community Complaints Sustained
- Administrative Investigations
- % Administrative Investigations Sustained
- Use of Force
- Community Complaints about Use of Force
This data has now been moved to a dedicated section — the Interactions Dashboard! New visualizations of this data are included below the links to both the Investigation Process Guide and the form for filing complaints.
Updated Dashboard Feature Guides
Below each dashboard, there are now links to guides which detail how to use the features included in the respective dashboard.
Direct links to the dashboard feature guides are included below:
Interactions Dashboard Context
First, there are two categories of complaints; Community Complaints and Administrative Investigations. The difference between them is the origin point. Community Complaints are from the public while Administrative Investigations are from South Bend Police staff.
Use of Force Complaints are a specific type of complaint. The aggregate numbers come from both the Community Complaints and Administrative Investigations categories. As with any complaint type, Use of Force Complaints can come from a public or internal origin point but, this visualization highlights this specific type.
These three visualizations seek to clearly show the proportion of each type relative to the day-to-day number of interactions the public has with the South Bend Police Department.
Note that the counts listed do not include open investigations since they have not yet concluded. Once an investigation closes, it will be added to the data.
Source Data Links — Open Data Portal
Curious about the source data for the Interactions Dashboard? Direct links to each dataset are included right below the dashboard! To see the City of South Bend’s Open Data Portal, click here.
