New data dashboard aims to help police, policymakers tackle crime
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The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments has released a data tool to improve crime reduction efforts and increase data transparency in communities.
A new dashboard looks to offer law enforcement agencies and government officials a near real-time view of local and regional crime trends to help them address the problem more efficiently.
Launched yesterday by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the dashboard tracks offenses like homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, burglary and larceny across the COG’s 24 member jurisdictions in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Data shows that, across the region, overall crime has declined by 13% in the first four months of 2025 from the same time period last year. Jurisdictions have also reported decreases in robberies (32%), homicide (30%), rape (23%) and aggravated assault (21%).
“With greater crime data transparency within the region, hopefully we can expect increased public cooperation, higher crime reporting rates, greater community trust and more effective crime prevention throughout our communities,” said Russ Hamill, chief of police for the Laurel Police Department in Maryland, during a meeting for MWCOG’s board of directors yesterday.
The dashboard connects to eight state and local data repositories or dashboards to automatically collect and upload crime data, said Eli Russ, senior public safety planner for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, during a media briefing Wednesday. Prince George’s County Police Department and MWCOG, for instance, leverage a REST API process to pull data from the county’s crime data portal into the MWCOG’s data tool every afternoon.
Some state and county jurisdictions, such as the Prince George’s County Police Department and the Maryland State Police Department, also provide data from local law enforcement agencies directly to the dashboard. Updates from participating police departments range from daily to weekly intervals.
Since police officers can see multijurisdictional crime data in a central spot, those insights could help law enforcement address and resolve incidents more efficiently across jurisdictions, Hamill said.
“We know the people committing crimes in our communities aren’t stopping at the jurisdictional lines,” he explained. Hamill pointed to a recent incident in which 121 cars were broken into in the greater Laurel region, which impacted three other counties in the area.
Detectives spent “hours upon hours” monitoring and tracking where incidents were occurring throughout the region to resolve the case, he said. A dashboard like MWCOG’s makes it easier for law enforcement to access mission-critical information in one location in real time to mitigate crimes faster.
The dashboard also includes data from MWCOG’s annual crime reports over the last 20 years, which Hamill said can help law enforcement identify crime trends and benchmark statistics to “see how we've addressed things in the past and how we can address things better going forward.”
The data can also help law enforcement agencies and officials provide the public with a more transparent picture of what’s happening in their communities to relieve “public misperceptions about the prevalence of crime,” Hamill said, citing how factors like social media content can elevate residents’ fear of crime.
Russ said MWCOG is planning “additional enhancements” to the dashboards in coming months and aims to open participation to other local, state, regional and federal agencies.