Hampton Roads leaders plan regional crime dashboard

Commission hopes sharing data will help curb violence

CHESAPEAKE — The word of the day Friday was “cooperation” at the second violent crime-focused work session of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, where the region’s mayors and city managers are putting their heads together to find a way to address the root causes of violence.

To accomplish that, the commission plans to design a violent crime dashboard, modeled after one used to track regional coronavirus data. The COVID-19 Planning Hub includes a wide array of interactive charts and data that are specific to each municipality in Hampton Roads.

To replicate the dashboard for crime, the commission needs more specific local data on crime incidents than

what is reported by the FBI and state police.

Crime statistics are outside the commission’s typical scope of work, said Greg Grootendorst, the group’s chief economist. To “build this data from the ground up,” he said the commission will need to bring together local experts, identify the metrics needed in the decision-making process for local leaders, assess the availability of that data and the technology requirements associated with that.

“Our first question really is what are you actually looking for? ... Typically we want access to accurate, reliable information, of course we want to use it to inform the decision making process,” Grootendorst explained during the meeting. “We need to get an understanding of what is out there (in terms of available data) in order to answer that.”

Norfolk City Manager Chip Filer said one crucial data point cities are currently missing is when crime within their borders may be related to that in another jurisdiction.

“We’re all focused on our own interventions on our own residents in our cities and I fear that in some of this, we’re missing that some of this needs to be a phone call from Norfolk to Hampton about ‘Hey we just saw some things go down and it appears as if they’re happening (in your area too),’ ” he said.

“Then you all can sort of go back and say ‘Oh yeah we’re doing some interventions in that particular spot.’ That’s a data point I’m not sure we have at a regional level that could be pretty useful.”

It’s not clear whether this dashboard would be public-facing or something shared internally among local governments, though the idea of making it public has been raised, according to Grootendorst.

“Until the experts have had a chance to comb through the data in detail, there’s no recommendation one way or the other (on making the dashboard public),” he said in an interview. “We’re still at the infant stages of this.”

Franklin Mayor Frank Rabil said having the dashboard will help address crime from a policy perspective, and the collaboration of local police chiefs who put it together will be another benefit.

“Having that dashboard is going to be invaluable, I think, to delving down into it and really getting into the causal effect of what is going on,” Rabil said. “These smaller little places don’t have the data analysts to do all this stuff for us.”

The commission’s focus on sharing crime data comes as the region has struggled to address violent crime. Homicides were up last year and in the first few months of 2022 across the region. Meanwhile, Hampton Roads police departments have struggled with staffing shortages.

“Violence knows no border — it’s a national crisis,” said Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer. “We can’t deal with that but we can deal with it locally.”

Norfolk Mayor Kenny Alexander stressed the need for qualitative analysis of the data collected to determine what themes are emerging from a regional level, which will inform policy decisions.

The commission’s executive director, Robert Crum Jr., will send out a request Monday to each municipality asking them to appoint a person to be part of the ongoing discussions about what information should be included in the dashboard.

At Friday’s meeting, Filer and Hampton City Manager Mary Bunting presented the results of the discussions in the Chief Administration Officers subcommittee formed following last month’s meeting on gun violence.

The subcommittee produced a detailed “fishbone” diagram — so named because the “spine” is gun violence and the “ribs” are the various factors that contribute to gun violence. Bunting said the diagram was not meant to be “exhaustive,” but it included contributing factors such as concentrated areas of poverty, access to guns, family dysfunction, mental health and the judicial system.

With the diagram in hand, the subcommittee identified opportunities for regional collaboration. Those included convening conversations with other regional partners like hospitals and mental health facilities, having a region-wide conflict resolution curriculum in the schools, and sharing law enforcement technology like cameras and National Integrated Ballistics Information Network systems that help officers identify bullets.

Filer proposed forming subcommittees around each of these issues in order to inform actions by local elected leaders and chief administrative officers.