Vela’s call for transparency would require police to release detailed data monthly

Austin Police Department may soon be required to regularly publish comprehensive data on the city’s digital portal in a move to add transparency and address a backlog of thousands of public information requests.

City Council is set to consider a resolution from Council Member Chito Vela that directs city staff to develop a plan for the release of three years’ worth of APD data. That release would be followed by monthly publication of the latest data involving calls for service, calls requiring mental health resources, personnel categories involved and hours worked in different assignments, overtime usage by activity category, retirements and other separations, warrants issued, response times and searches conducted.

If it passes, the city manager will have to submit a timeline and budget for the data management and publication to City Council by December.

Vela’s proposal comes weeks after the publication of a city audit that found APD recently had a backlog of 20,000 public information requests that have gone unfulfilled, with many taking a year or more to receive a response.

“Someone in the police department told me we’ve been two years away from a good data portal for 20 years, and I think it’s true,” Vela told the Austin Monitor.

“The police department wants it, the public wants it, the council wants it, but for various technical and administrative reasons, it has not happened. The police department wants it because they are drowning in public information requests that are difficult and time-consuming for them to fulfill.”

Vela said the data, which will be gathered and analyzed at the census block level of approximately 200 homes to protect caller privacy, is needed for the city and police department make the best budgetary and operational decisions. To assist in the effort, Council approved a budget increase for APD to hire four information specialists who will be assigned on the project that Vela said should be available for public view by next spring.

“We want a data-informed public safety policy, and don’t want to be governing by anecdote and reacting to the latest kind of spectacular crime or whatever the case may be. We want a more robust, data-driven policy, and I think the public wants it too.”

Vela received assistance in structuring his resolution from local data and policy analyst Julio Gonzalez Altamirano, who began requesting workload data from APD two years ago and has received minimal responses after months of waiting.

Altamirano said analysis conduced years ago by former Council Member Bill Spelman showed him the importance of Council having complete information when deciding police budgets that total billions of dollars over a single Council term.

“At the core of the analysis was to try to understand how much work is Austin generating for police, because if you think about it, a lot of our discussions focus on what do cities of our size have in terms of a policing ratio?” he said. “A more fair way that allows us to evaluate performance and more rigorously decide the number of resources is to have a sense of actual workload.”

Altamirano said it’s likely both APD and Council will get a clearer picture of the resources needed to best address crime once data begins being parsed and analyzed at census block levels.

“​​Sometimes enterprises that are large that have a lot of people do not invest sufficiently in analytics, and even when they invest sufficiently in analytics that does not mean that leadership is asking the right questions,” he said.

“One of the things that’s important here and why this is an enormously important set of data is because of the scale of the spending for the department as a whole. These are massive sums and being able to find a 5 percent to 10 percent efficiency gain is really valuable right now.”

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.