Getting access to Police incident logs from a computer aided dispatch system

I’ve been working for several weeks to get access to the raw police and fire department incident call logs here in Watertown, MA. After a lengthy freedom of information request process it became clear that I would have to get on the phone with someone at the Police department about this request. Why isn’t this information just public by default?

During the conversation it was clear that Capt. Rocca couldn’t understand why I would even want this information. “We’re not Boston Matt, we don’t have homicides and 1,000s of robberies”.  After I spoke with him for about 20 minutes he stated that the town would not write a custom report for the IMC Computer Aided Dispatch system to satisfy this request but that I could have the daily log in paper format. With logs for 1 year running about ~1,000 pages at $.50/page I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Paper is useless to me as I’d have to scan it all in and then try to do character recognition on it anyway. No thanks. After asking a number of technical/process questions that Capt. Rocca couldn’t answer he said that he would have someone from the IT department call me about my questions.

When speaking with Officer Robert Knell in IT I brought up how http://www.crimereports.com must be getting this information in a manner similar to how I am asking for it. I’ll paraphrase his initial response: “Unless you have a ton of money to write software to talk to the IMC system you are out of luck”. I don’t buy that. So after our discussion I thought more about what the system currently looks like for crimereports.com to get this data and wondered how I might be able to piggyback on that existing process.

I think I have come up with a less than optimal solution but one that I think will fit into the current Police Department and town workflows and tools. I hope that the Town and Police Department will make this modification and take this baby step toward changing their processes to publish more useable data to the general public.

Here is my email to Chief Deveau and Captain Rocca:

Thanks for the phone call yesterday and the follow up from the IT department. I have a better picture of the moving parts as a result of our conversation. While I understand that this is not a frequent or familiar request I have a proposal for how the public can get access to this information in a similar manner as crimereports.com.

My requested change:
Crimereports.com uses an existing IMC/CAD daily log report and then each day that file is sent by a Watertown Police Department employee to crimereports.com. I’m asking that in addition or as a replacement to having that daily log report sent to crimereports.com that the same report output also be published to the town Document Center: http://www.ci.watertown.ma.us/documentcenterii.aspx in the Police folder.

I believe by re-using an already existing report and a similar process that this is a change that benefits the public and not just a for-profit corporation.

Here is a sketch of what this requested change would look like.

Uploaded with Skitch!

UPDATE – My email conversation thread with Capt. Rocca and Officer Knell of the Watertown, MA police department.

Hi Capt. Rocca,
Ok. I’m thinking about how to still get this information in some otherformat than paper. A few questions now. How much is Watertown paying Crimereports.com for this service? Also could you please explain the process that I would need to go throughto install my own server into the police department in the same manneras CrimeReports? I would be willing to write software to integratewith IMC and install my own server into the police department in thesame manner as CrimeReports if the specifications/requirements weremade public. For your own information I’m going to adding this email thread to my public blog so that others that are also trying to make similar requests in other communities can learn from this experience.
Thanks,
Matt

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Rocca, Thomas

UPDATE 2: After getting a less than awesome response from the Police Department about how to get access to this information I came up with this email response

May 13, 2011

Hi Capt. Rocca,

Ok. I’m thinking about how to still get this information in some other

format than paper.

A few questions now.

How much is Watertown paying Crimereports.com for this service? Also
could you please explain the process that I would need to go through
to install my own server into the police department in the same manner
as CrimeReports? I would be willing to write software to integrate
with IMC and install my own server into the police department in the
same manner as CrimeReports if the specifications/requirements were
made public.

For your own information I’m going to adding this email thread to my
public blog so that others that are also trying to make similar
requests in other communities can learn from this experience.

Thanks,
Matt

Thanks,
Matt