How Mapping Community Assets Can Inform Police Response
Police departments are tasked with responding to all types of calls for service, regardless of whether they are best equipped to handle each situation. One example of this is involving individuals in mental health crises or domestic disturbances, as these interactions have the possibility of escalating quickly, leading to serious injuries and even fatalities. Due to this, in the last 4 years, there have been significant efforts to reimagine traditional policing, especially regarding non-violent situations.
While there are many different policing reform methods that have been researched, our own Research team wanted to explore how law enforcement can better utilize the resources already available in communities.
In this way, we can identify moments where people are in need.
Community assets are the resources a city provides to the public, such as services, connections, and support systems. Through our work with police departments in Rochester, NY, and West Sacramento, CA, our team realized how many of these assets exist, and we quickly wondered how we could use calls for service data to help answer these questions.
Our reasoning was simple: if officers were made aware of social service agencies in proximity to the call for service, they could better direct individuals to acute care.
With that in mind, our team set out to create a dashboard that overlaid social service agencies with calls for service data to explore an avenue for collaboration between law enforcement and community assets.
Our Process
To better understand how the calls for service data is related to community assets, we isolated the calls from data available in Rochester and West Sacramento related to personal crises and categorized them based on the recorded nature of the call, for example; mental health, domestic violence, medical, welfare, vagrancy.
From there, we identified the community assets already available in these communities. These included shelters, food pantries, clinics, mental health centers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, and other organizations that specialized in providing targeted care for people needing assistance.
We created a dashboard that mapped the police calls for service and the community assets to see if there was a relationship between call types and the social service agencies available.
Some questions we asked were:
- Are there a sufficient number of rehab centers and clinics in areas where there is a high volume of drug-related calls?
- Do areas with more vagrancy calls have accessible shelters or housing services?
- Could a tool like this aid law enforcement in providing the proper response to people in crisis?
Our Findings
The dashboard also clued us in to a possible disconnect between need and available resources. We noticed that community assets are concentrated near urban centers in Rochester, NY, and West Sacramento, CA, and are more sparse in the suburbs and surrounding areas.
Neighborhoods that experience a higher volume of calls like vagrancy often do not have the social services to adequately address those issues. Seeing this disparity on a map makes it easier to see which areas are under-resourced while providing direction around solutions.
For example, law enforcement may now identify opportunities to bridge service gaps, equipped with knowledge of the available community assets. City councils or mayors could draw from a map like this to create targeted initiatives or support funding for social services expansion for their constituents. There are many possibilities to explore when combining data like these.
Interested in a deeper dive into the relationship between police calls for service and community assets? Our upcoming research report on the topic provides more information.
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