Salt Lake City Police Use Crime Stats, Analysts to Target Trouble Areas
May 3, 2019, 6:48 PM | Updated: 10:02 pm
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Officers with the Salt Lake City Police Department say they’ve recently been able to slash crime rates in target areas, using near real-time crime statistics, and a team of analysts. Those efforts were focused over the past couple of weeks on increases in burglaries, in Rose Park, and the Avenues.
“We’re able to take that information and get that to our patrol officers, to our bike officers, so they’re aware that we’re having this spike,” Detective Michael Ruff explained. “This data-driven policing is really allowing us to not have to wait as long to react. It’s less guesswork, and it’s more targeted enforcement.”
In roughly one week, Ruff says residential burglaries were down 58.3% in Rose Park, and 54.6% in the Avenues.
“We’re able to look at that and pinpoint down when these crimes were occurring, if they’re in a very narrow area, if they’re in a broad area. What time they’re occurring,” Ruff said. “Internally, we’re getting that information very quickly, so we compare that on a week to week basis, on a month-long basis, then on a three year basis.”
Data from the program, called CompStat is also available to citizens online, and it’s broken down by each council district, here: http://www.slcpd.com/open-data/compstat/