Police department turns to new data tool to boost performance
Roland Shainidze Photogaphy via Getty Images
The Rochester, New York, Police Department started using a tool known as Commons in April. It provides frequently updated criminal justice data and can help set policy goals.
The Rochester, New York, Police Department is the first in the country to use a new data tool that makes available data on crime and police performance that the community specifically requests.
Called Commons, the tool went live April 30 and is the result of a collaboration among the department; Measures for Justice, a Rochester-based nonprofit; and a community advisory board that the organization helped assemble. Commons puts everyone on the same page with accurate, frequently updated criminal justice data such as crime trends, call response times, use-of-force incidents, officer training and resource allocation.
The department already had a robust open data portal, but it provided only crime data, and community members wanted more metrics, said Rochester Police Capt. Greg Bello. The department partnered with MFJ about two years ago and the nonprofit established the board, which includes representatives from local organizations, such as the Urban League of Rochester and United Christian Leadership Ministries, to come up with categories of data they felt should also be publicly available.
“Ultimately, they’ve put this Commons platform together that’s looking at community-driven categories, whether that be on community engagement, calls for service and traffic stops, whether it be on crime reduction, whether it be on uses of force, whether it be on accountability,” Bello said. The data is then presented in graphs that users can drill into to get detailed information using filters, such as by month or year or crime type, he said.
Not all that data is easily searchable, Bello said, so the department’s Office of Business Intelligence and Professional Standards Section, referred to by other police departments as internal affairs, worked on finding the data and making it available to MFJ.
“When the Community Advisory Board comes to the table, they have to agree to pay attention to the data and use it for accountability. Law enforcement…when they come to the table, have to agree to give data,” said Sema Taheri, vice president of research at MFJ, which developed a similar tool for prosecutors in 2021. “We tell them the data elements or the fields that we are particularly interested in tracking or seeing and collecting from them, and then they help us get that information out of their systems.”
MFJ’s team of researchers and technologists can help agencies pull the data if they need assistance, she added. Similarly, if a department lacks the technology or resources to scrub personally identifiable information from the data, MFJ can also help with that.
“To do this work, we just need to be able to identify that it is an individual person and if that person shows up elsewhere. That helps us to do appropriate measurement,” Taheri said. “If we do receive personally identifiable information, MFJ has a security system and a [virtual private network] and all the appropriate security methods such that the data that includes PII does not leave that secure server. We then do that anonymization before the data goes anywhere outside of that server.”
Besides increasing public-facing transparency, Bello said he expects the tool to help inform decision- and policy-making internally.
“We’re not doing the interpretations of data at all,” he said. “We’re leaving it to [MFJ], and so having a different set of eyes looking at things and then presenting it in a different way than we’ve looked at it internally obviously will help us.”
He pointed to assessing how policy changes affect use of force as an example: “A juvenile use-of-force policy was changed a few years ago…. On their platform, it’s going to have a marker, ‘use-of-force policy was changed on this date.’ What happened to the use of force after that? Did use of force go significantly up? Did it go significantly down? Did it stay level? You can start to track at least the association of a policy or culture change and how that affected the stats that go along with that.”
Another aspect of the community advisory board’s role is to work with the department to set a policy goal. In Rochester’s case, the goal is to reduce the median call response time to four minutes for civilian-generated dispatches by March 2026. The median time in Dec. 2024 was 5.9 minutes and as high as 15 in 2021, according to the portal.
Rochester is one of two police departments to be a part of a national network of agencies using Commons. The West Sacramento, California, Police Department went live with Commons on May 7.
Because the platform is so new, the immediate next steps are collecting more data and adding filters, Taheri said.
“As we start to learn how people are using the site, if there’s anything that they might want further that we can provide — the data obviously have to be available for that — but if we could give more filters or more ability to see that and dive deeper, we’re trying to do that,” she said.