Guided Tour of South Bend’s Updated Police Dashboards

Kelsey Lange
Nov 4 · 3 min read

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 2017, 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

Police Dashboard v1 and v2

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

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.

Interactions Section with New Dashboard

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.

Links to Guides and Guide Preview

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.

Innovation in South Bend

Stories and updates from the City of South Bend’s Department of Innovation & Technology

Kelsey Lange

Written by

I am a Business Analyst on the Business Analytics team for the City of South Bend

Innovation in South Bend

Stories and updates from the City of South Bend’s Department of Innovation & Technology

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