ANN ARBOR – The Ann Arbor Police Department launched a new tool for community members to access city crime statistics on Wednesday.
The new, interactive dashboard is an effort to provide the public with more transparency, department officials said. Among data available to explore are arrests, calls for service and citations. Members of the public can also sort through information using the race and gender of the individuals involved.
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“The public is owed transparency and accountability, and our new dashboard is the first step in a commitment to providing greater transparency to the Ann Arbor community,” Interim Police Chief Aimee Metzer said in a statement. “Our goal is to continue to increase the information listed in our dashboard, with plans to include police use-of-force incidents in the very near future.”
According to a release, the dashboard is separated into three main categories:
- Calls for service: Represent the incidents requiring police response or attention. These can be requests for service which are called into 911, called into a non-emergency number, or are initiated by officers when they perform services in the field.
- Arrests: Defined as when a person is taken into the government’s custody and detained. Some arrests are completed when a paper summons is issued on the scene, while others involve an arrestee being transported to a law enforcement facility. When an officer is unable to determine race and gender, the arrest race and gender categories are marked as UNKNOWN.
- Citations: A legal notice to a person or motor vehicle charged with a violation of law (or city ordinance), especially a minor violation. The cited person or motor vehicle is the defendant. A citation can be a civil infraction or a misdemeanor depending on the seriousness of the violation. All defendants who receive a citation must respond to the allegations in the citation. When an officer is unable to determine race and gender, the race and gender categories are marked as UNKNOWN.
Information on the dashboard is updated every five minutes.
To access the new tool, click here.