Police sharing transparency data
Area law enforcement launch dashboard websites to build more community trust
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and three local police departments are the first of what will be many county law enforcement agencies to launch transparency dashboards in the months ahead.
Last fall, the Oakland County Executive’s Office, the Courts and Law Enforcement Management Information Systems (CLEMIS), and Detroitbased Arx Community entered into a two-year agreement to help county departments build and maintain transparency dashboards, for free, that include data on citations, warning, and parking tickets, arrests, and calls for service broken down by age, gender, race, month and year.
The partnership is aimed at building community trust by making police data more publicly-accessible and promoting open and transparent government. Arx Community will be automatically updating the websites each month with data received from the respective departments. Departments can provide additional information and statistics beyond the required data on citations, arrests, and calls for service if they choose.
Currently, transparency dashboards for the sheriff’s office, and the Lathrup Village, Novi, and Southfield police departments have launched. All other county police departments will be coming online sometime in the next six months, according to Andrew McK
eever, Arx Community spokesperson. You can access links to each dashboard by visiting https:// page.arxcommunity.com/ oaklandcty/clemis.
Undersheriff Mike McCabe said the websites are making public information and police statistics more readily available to county residents. Over time, the sheriff’s office will add more information and data to the dashboard to include information on various policies and procedures that are already available via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“This is about showing the residents here in Oakland County what we do and how we do it,” he said. “(Beyond the two years), we will continue to provide the dashboard. It’s not that expensive quite frankly. We have a $165 million budget. We will find the money for it.”
Agencies will be able to customize their transparency dashboards with unique verbiage and data unique to their department (training, use of force, etc.). Arx Community is working directly with each department to design, test and certify a customized dashboard.
You can access links to each website by visiting https://page.arxcommunity.com/oaklandcty/ clemis. More dashboard links will be added as they come online.
CLEMIS, which is open to all public safety agencies in Michigan, contains police department statistical data and serves as a technical link promoting communication and sharing of criminal justice information. A total of 126 Michigan police agencies are members of CLEMIS, including every police agency in Oakland County. Membership fees are based on the number of sworn officers.
Total start-up costs are estimated at $250,500 with Oakland County paying $4,000 each for up to 42 Oakland County CLEMIS agencies to cover the first two years of service. After two years, thee agencies can choose to continue providing their transparency websites by paying an annual fee to Arx Community. The fee amount depends on the size of the agency.
Departments are being given the option of customizing their existing websites, for an extra fee, to include the transparency data or launching a separate transparency website.
In addition to police departments, over 50 fire departments and nearly 50 municipal and district courts are CLEMIS members. Members also include FBI, Detroit and Southeast Michigan Information and Intelligence Center, Michigan Intelligence Operations Center, Michigan State Police, U.S. Secret Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.