The San Antonio Police Department launched a new data dashboard on Friday that shows when and where crime is reported across the city — as well as arrests made in response.
“This is the first step to greater access and transparency about the police response citywide or in the areas people are most concerned about, such as their places of business or residence,” SAPD Chief William McManus stated in a news release. “This dashboard will expand the department’s ability to work with the community to address their concerns in a collaborative and transparent way.”
The dashboard is the first of several focused on public safety that the city’s Integrated Community Safety Office is working on. Unlike the current crime map, users can compare crime stats — including types and number of offenses and arrests as well as response times — month over month or week over week, down to the zip code.
“It’s a very interactive experience and you can filter it by any kind of specific problem or you can just type in your zip code and see what’s happening in your area,” Maria Vargas-Yates, the city’s public safety outcomes coordinator, told the San Antonio Report.
She encouraged users to explore the website.
“Click on zip codes in the map, click on the line graphs and see how the data changes,” Vargas-Yates said. “You can’t break it, click around.”
Currently, the only data available on the dashboard is from January through September this year, but users can expect it to be updated with the previous month’s data every month for the foreseeable future, Vargas-Yates said. Eventually, data from 2023 will be added.
Crime data before then isn’t formatted in the same way, so it’s unlikely that historical information will be uploaded to this tool, she said. The current map, powered by Lexis Nexis, will remain live. The new tool uses Microsoft’s Power BI software.
The Community Safety Office plans to add at least two more dashboards in the near future that incorporate the San Antonio Fire Department’s data and the Good Neighbor Program.
Residents can provide feedback on what additional information they want to see on the dashboard and how to make the user experience better through a survey at the bottom of the landing page.
Vargas-Yates said she hopes residents use the tool to empower conversations about public safety.
“People can see what these officers are doing in the places that I live or the places I go for entertainment or work,” she said. “That’s a great value from this. And the other part is, if a resident or community is concerned about crime or maybe lack of police activity, they can use this tool to guide that conversation and be able to point to very specific things — then it’ll help make that collaboration with the police even better.”
The first eight months of 2024 in San Antonio saw a 3% reduction in overall crime compared to the same period last year, officials told a City Council committee last month.
The city has launched violent crime reduction strategies and a property crime task force in recent years — but experts, including McManus, stopped short of attributing the overall decrease to any one program or initiative.
