The ability to see raw numbers in police crime data matters

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Matt

Yesterday I came across the article Watertown Police Dept. is Fighting Rising Crime Rate with a Smaller Force on the watertown.patch.com website. After I read the article I wish Charlie Breitrose, the reporter for the Watertown Patch had pushed Chief Deveau further to better explain his comments and stats mentioned in the piece.

I found the statements made by the Chief that referenced Columbine hyperbolic and unnecessary.  “At the high school, you can identify troubled kids and work with them, so you can get through to them before – God forbid – it becomes an Columbine situation.” I wish Charlie had followed up with the Chief about his purpose in invoking the images of children climbing out of windows with armed SWAT officers nearby. I also would have like to see Charlie ask the Chief to provide data that would support the argument that having school resource officers in high schools prevents school shooting and rampage events.

While I found the Columbine statements manipulative – the more dangerous statement that wasn’t fact checked or presented with more context and supporting data was the referencing of percentages by the Chief to support his argument that the Watertown Police Department needs additional town funds to keep patrol staff at a level that prevents crime.

Percent increases without raw numbers can be incredibly misleading. So I got curious when I saw the Chief reference 100% increases in rape over 2010, 86% percent increases in robberies over 2010 and a 16% increase in assaults from 2010.

A 100% increase in rapes is a serious event – we need more officers. Or is it?

Based on the aggregated statistics provided by the WPD on their website http://www.watertownpd.org/statistics/stats.html the actual number increases look like this:

  • 4 rapes in 2010
  • 13 robberies in 2010
  • 172 assaults in 2010

Based on the % increases (it isn’t clear if those %’s are a projection or actuals) as stated by the Police Department the actual increases look like this:

  • 8 rapes in 2011
  • 24 robberies in 2011
  • 199 assaults in 2011

The Chief doesn’t define what “total crime” is and the WPD website doesn’t either so I’m not going to include that in the 2011 actuals.

So the scary 100% increase represents an actual increase in numbers of 4. Obviously we don’t want to see any increases in rapes but saying an increase of 4 to 8 has a much different feel than a “100% increase”.

Raw actual numbers for a single year can be interesting but trends in actual numbers are even more useful. We should answer the following questions:

  1. How have the incident numbers for different crimes changed over time?
  2. How has the staffing of patrol officers changed during that same time period? (I will ask the WPD to provide that information)
  3. How many of these incidents led to arrests? (I will ask the WPD to provide that information)
  4. How many of the arrests led to convictions? (I will ask the WPD to provide that information)

Trending reported crime incidents

Time for data visualization! We will use the high level, aggregated data provided by the police department on their website. Ideally we’d use line item level incident reports to generate this data but until the Watertown Police Department answers my Freedom of Information Request to get access to the raw daily log data we’ll have to rely on the summed numbers they provide.

I used the data provided on the WPD stats section of their website to generate the trending chart below. The chart below shows how the incidents like Homicide, Rape, Robbery, Assault, Burglary, Larceny and Motor Vehicle Theft have changed during the 2000 – 2010 period. There is also a larger and interactive version of this chart available.

The result of graphing this data over time? Crime is about the same as it has been over a 10 year period and actually down slightly for some incidents types over the past 3 years. While a jump of 2x in rapes should be looked into – how many of those will lead to arrests and convictions are two important questions.

So our crime incidents haven’t changed drastically over a 10 year period so while the Chief has stated that “The department, however, lost four officers in fiscal 2009 and another four the following year. That reduced the number of patrol officers from 55 to 47″ the crime reporting data indicates that as community our crime has not spiked as a result of those reductions. That leads me to want to understand Police Department staffing model changes during this same 10 year period. Given that our crime report data has remained relatively stable during these previous 10 years that would indicate that our reductions in force have little impact on reported crimes.

What the data does show is that there has been a drop in arrests during this period.

Reports and Arrests

There has been a decrease in crime reports during the period and at first blush, seeing the number of arrests going from a high of 737 in 2000 to a low of 418 in 2010 seems like cuts in the Police Department have had a big impact on arrests. What we need to do is place both crime reports and arrests on the same trending chart to see how both have changed over time.

The chart below does that.

Notice that both of the trending lines follow a similar path so that as crime reports have decreased so have arrests. It would help to have the ability to overlay police department staffing trends on this graph so we could better understand the connections between department staffing levels, reports, arrests and convictions.

Summary

While I think having access to more specific Police Department data will help us as citizens make more informed decisions about funding our public safety offices, what will be needed is the ability to compare Watertown, MA data with our surrounding communities. I hope to see our police employees start providing information to the public in the same way as our Town Auditor is required by law to report municipal financial data and our School District is required to report data to the Department of Education.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Municipalities, Police, Watertown | Leave a comment

A proposal regarding food and milk choice in Watertown, MA schools

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

When Amy Vachon posted in the Watertown Parents for Strong Schools Facebook group about ‘sugary flavored milks‘ I would not have expected 30 comments from people quite firm on one side or the other. I think there are commonalities in the comments and a way to satisfy all parties.

Goals
I like to think about shared goals. I teased out the following goals from comments in that thread:

  • Provide healthy food options for our school age children
  • Continue parental freedoms to choose foods

There may be a few other goals in the comment thread but I think those were the two major themes. If there are other major goals that I didn’t pick up on we should talk about those too.

Assumptions
Kerrilyn Daley stated that parents can work with the school cafeterias to ‘limit what your children can purchase through the school‘.

A proposal
With a minor change we can use the existing cafeteria blocking/limiting system to satisfy the two main goals above. The subtle difference is changing the current system from one that requires parents to ‘blacklist’ certain foods to one where parents ‘whitelist’ the foods we want to be made available to our children.

This is the same strategy that many IT companies use to securely operate their computer networks. You increase security by blocking everything by default and only explicitly allowing access to the websites and computer networks you want.

How might this work
A cafeteria food checklist is sent home with students that contains a list of all the foods and food options and the supporting nutritional information. Parents would provide a checkmark next the options that they approve for their kids. A website for this would be ideal, but time, money and not everyone has access. That list might look like this:

Meals:
Option A
Option B (X)
Option C (X)
Option D

Drinks:
Option A (X)
Option B
Option C
Option D

Snacks:
Option A (X)
Option B
Option C
Option D

After filling out the checklist the cafeteria staff updates the computer system to block access to those foods not on an approved parent checklist.

Summary
I believe making this change would take advantage of the existing infrastructure to increase parental cafeteria food awareness, allow parents with healthy choice concerns to better restrict access to certain foods, while continuing to provide parental freedom of choice.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Matt

 

Posted in Schools, Watertown | 1 Comment

Where does the data at www.nearbyfyi.com come from?

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Matt

A friend asked me this question in a private email. Here is my response:

Hi Phil,

This is long so short answers first: Data comes from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education [1], the MA Department of Revenue [2] and numerous emails, conversations and Freedom of Information Requests filed with Watertown, MA [3].

Thanks for the plug. I’m still in the very, very early stages trying to figure out exactly the direction I want to go and the tools aren’t what I wanted to have public yet… but there are so many people in Watertown asking me budget questions so I guess it is better to have something up for people to use than nothing at all?

You almost nailed my goals for www.nearbyfyi.com but here is what I’ve been thinking:

Allow citizens to easily request and view municipal information, using comparison and conversation tools to better understand what the data means and then use that improved knowledge to help guide our municipal leaders into making decisions that benefit our communities.

I also hope that my efforts can help guide municipalities into realizing that we can all benefit if our municipal data is public by default.

*I also reserve the right to modify these goals as I continue to learn more :)

Local municipalities in MA are required by law to report school and financial data to the state. The local school district data goes to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE), where it is normalized and then made available via the web [1]. There is some awesome data here but the presentation didn’t really allow for easy comparison for the types of questions that I wanted answered. I believe the DOE is using Cognos behind the scenes. I’ve had a number of in person conversations with our Watertown Superintendent and she is lining up a conversation for me with some people in the ESE to see how I might be able to get the data more easily than using Nokogiri to screen scrape the web pages and pull it into my own mysql db.

All high level local government financial data must be reported to the Mass Department of Revenue. They also process and normalize the data and then present it in great detail. Unfortunately that detail is locked up in Excel spreadsheets and very few people will go through the effort to dig through those. This data is managed in the “Data Bank”[2] and I have an open invitation from the Director there to have a conversation about the data and how we as the public can get better access to it.

Detailed local data is much more challenging to come by and I have much more detail about Watertown because I’ve done a ton of work learning who to poke, prod and send my freedom of information requests to. I’ve learned that most local government employees view putting 100 pages of scanned non-OCR friendly PDFs up on the town “Document Center” is sharing their data “digitally”.

Data from local governments are tucked away in a handful of very expensive client/server payroll and budgeting tools that were born in the late 80s. You can only imagine what that data might look like when it comes out. I also wanted to give a big shout out to Stefano and the Google Refine team – I’m not sure how I would have prepared the shitty spreadsheet data that the town provides without it.

There are three main data sources in cities/towns and only a handful of vendors for each. Many cities use financial management software called MUNIS from Tyler Technologies [4]. Just about every school in the country that has invested in IT is using Blackboard [5] and TriTech [6] has a large percentage of the market for Computer Aided Dispatch for Fire and Police departments. Solve access and expose the data in those three proprietary systems and a large portion of the country is covered.

Since my dad retired last year he and I have been collaborating on ideas to develop software that would help municipalities and citizens migrate away from their expensive, one off websites and communication tools. There are ~87,000 municipalities in the US with combined budgets in the ~3-4 trillion range so I was interested in knowing if I could apply some of my experience in web development to address what I saw as an opportunity to help explain how my taxes are used, identify areas for efficiency gains, increase citizen participation and possibly help my own bottom line.

My dad was a Town Councilor, got his Masters in Public Administration and was then a City Manager for 15 years. He is also pretty hip to working with computers, we were both typing BASIC from zines into our Atari 800 and he is a wiz when it comes to Excel pivot tables. It took several months of nearly daily conversations before he really understood what I meant when I kept saying that our government data should be public by default. He’s been great to bounce ideas off of and has helped bootstrap my learning about local government.

I’ve been using my own interest in Watertown as a way to learn more about the processes, types of data and more importantly the culture of information and data in local cities and towns. I’m not sure where things will lead but it has been a great way for me to keep a bit of programming alive in my otherwise Project Management life. I’ve been blogging [7] about my efforts and tools in hopes that others might be learn a bit and also keep me motivated to keep at it.

I have the backend screen scrapers, csv parsers, database, and web code in a private github repo that I’m going to open up on June 6th. I’m going to create a step by step guide and get the code into a place where you’ll be able to request information similar to what I have been gathering in Watertown for your local community and then import it into nearbyfyi.com so you can compare with other communities.

This has been a long email and I have a ton of other thoughts about this, additional goals, ideas for revenue and how I think tools like this might actually have the ability to help improve our communities. I’d love to talk with anyone interested in helping me figure out how I might be able to pull some of this off.

Thanks,
Matt

  1. http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/
  2. http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=dorsubtopic&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Local+Officials&L2=Municipal+Data+and+Financial+Management&L3=Data+Bank+Reports&sid=Ador[3]
  3. http://www.mattmacdonald.com/category/watertown/
  4. http://www.tylertech.com/
  5. http://www.blackboard.com
  6. http://www.tritech.com/
  7. http://www.mattmacdonald.com
Posted in FOIA, Government, Municipalities, Watertown | Leave a comment

Watertown, MA Town Council public speaking time OPEB benefits and true department costs

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

Here is the text for my 2 minutes of public speaking time at the Town Council meeting tonight.

Hello Honorable Town Council & Town Manager,

I wanted to use my 2 minutes of public speaking time tonight to cover two topics:
First – I’d like to make sure people are aware of why they should attend the COMMITTEE OF THE BUDGET & FISCAL OVERSIGHT meeting that will be taking place on Monday May 23rd 2011 @ 7:00 PM in this same room.

The health care and Other Post-Employment Benefits programs in Watertown play a significant part in our current and future financial situation. For those with access to the internet Google: “OPEB liability Massachusetts” to get a sense of the challenge we are facing.

If you care at all about the future quality of our schools, roads, public safety and all other town services, this is the meeting you need to attend. We as citizens need to become better informed about our current employee benefits, how big our unfunded debt is and what our town is doing to address it. At this meeting the Town Manager and sub-committee will hopefully be discussing these topics, increasing public awareness and informing the public about the plans for Watertown to avoid bankruptcy.

Second, I’d like to ask the Honorable Town Council request a change to how information in the Watertown Budget Reports are presented and provided. I’m asking that our future budget reports show the full cost to the town for each department. For example: The most recent Manager’s Proposed 2012 budget contains line items for PENSION COSTS and INSURANCE & EMPLOYEE BENEFITS – $8,822,766 and $13,281,474 respectively. What isn’t clear in those line items is how the money is allocated across the various town departments. High level department and school appropriations only tell part of the financial story as there are many other costs tucked away in other line items that relate to that department. Please consider requesting that the Town Manager and Town Auditor make this change in the future.

Thank you for your time,
Matt MacDonald

Posted in Budget, Government, Pensions, Uncategorized, Watertown | Leave a comment

Should our school system get more money, where will it go and how will it benefit our students?

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

This spring rumors about the impending collapse of our Watertown Massachusetts school budget were being circulated among parents, newspapers and community members. As a parent I became alarmed about the possibilities and have been spending the past several months trying to better understand our school budget and how it fits into the overall municipal government and budgeting process. I began digging into the data, attending School Committee and Town Council meetings to become better informed. It became clear that funding for the Watertown School Department is nearly 90% reliant on the appropriation from the town. If the school was to get any additional money it would need to come from the town.

During the public hearings and meetings I have been attending many parents have been asking that the Watertown Town Council and Town Manager appropriate more money to the school system. Initially I also wanted to stand up and give my unwavering support to push for an increase in the slice of pie that the school gets from the town but I wanted more data and information to help me understand what position I should take. A question that I wanted to feel better about being able to answer was:

Should our school system get more money, where will it go and how will it benefit our students?

Over the past months I have been in contact with the current Superintendent Ann Koufman, Business Manager Allie Altman, Town Manager Mike Driscoll, Town Auditor Tom Tracy and various Town Councilors who have have taken significant time to help me understand what data and information to be asking for and then helping me make sense of it. After these conversations I had a better understanding of the financial picture for Watertown but what was missing was how municipal and school department spending compared to other communities.

I felt that this was an opportunity to satisfy my burning itch to combine an interest in local government, software development and community participation. What I needed was a solid grasp of the questions and data. I also needed a lot of data. I think I have some of both now.

Over this past weekend I updated the website project that I have been working on http://www.nearbyfyi.com to import data from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and the Massachusetts Department of Education website. Once I had that data I was then able to build a few simple tools that allow people to compare municipal budget and education data across all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns.

The Department of Education has dome some amazing work collecting data and taking the time to normalize it for all of the Massachusetts school districts. Without their efforts and data I would have no way of being able to answer some of my questions. Not all is rosy though – the way data is made available and presented on the DOE website could be improved and it left me wanting to see the data presented differently. I knew I could do that.

The DOE provides the school district data in chunks that don’t easily allow for comparison between districts. I found it challenging to see how one communities graduation rate, demographic and spending compares to another. In order to satisfy my curiosity I ended up using a Ruby Gem called Nokogiri to write a Ruby on Rails Rake task that screen scrapes the well formatted DOE website data and then inserts that into a relational database. After getting the website data into a database this gave me the ability to write my own views and presentations of the data for the web. Here is how how I ended up presenting the data.

Compare Massachusetts School Districts

At NearbyFYI you can select up to 3 Massachusetts school districts for comparison. After I developed this tool and shared it with the Superintendent she pointed me to the District Analysis and Review Tool (DART) tool which “offers a snapshot of district and school performance, allowing users to easily track select data elements over time, and make sound, meaningful comparisons to the state or to “comparable” organizations”. That sounds awesome and I’m very interested to try the tool out, but because it is locked inside an Excel spreadsheet I’ll want to port the functionality to the web so those without Excel or knowledge of how to use it can get easier access to this information.

While the total school budget plays a part in how a school district is performing a better question might be how is it being spent. The people I have talked with at committee meetings and while dropping my daughter off at school have constantly compared Watertown to Waltham and Belmont. After using my comparison tool to review the data something interesting presented itself in the data: While Belmont has the best performing school they spend the least amount per pupil. This contradicted my initial belief that providing more money per student would help overall performance indicators. After viewing the data in this new way it seems to me that two very important indicators of school district performance are family income and student breakdown (SPED|non-SPED|ELL|Limited Income|etc.).

Here is the median family income data and 2009 (graduation)/(dropout) rate as presented by the US Census  Bureau and the Department of Education:

  • Waltham: $81,733 – (77.5%)/(14.6%)
  • Watertown: $83,031 – (81.9%)/(7.7%)
  • Belmont: $117,292 – (94.0%)/(1.1%)

Now take a look family income for severely underperforming school districts like:

  • Lawrence: $36,573 – (48.1%)/(29.7%)
  • Brockton: $58,001 – (71.5%)/(16.1%)
  • Lowell: $56,494 – (70.0%)/(13.1%)

Luckily the DOE also provides a good financial breakdown for each school district that helps to show how the school district budget is internally allocated. I haven’t yet pulled that data into the NearbyFYI school district comparison tool but I intend to. Something interesting shows up when you review the financial data – in 2009 only $0.33 of every school dollar is earmarked for direct teaching staff salaries. 14% goes to insurance, retirement programs and other items. Another 14% are payments to “out of district schools”. A significant reason that Belmont is able to provide a lower average cost per pupil is that their “out of district schools” costs are only 10% of their total budget.

I think that household income, demographic and crime data will also have a part to play in this story so I’m planning on incorporating the US Census data and I have an outstanding request with the Watertown Police Department for them to provide their crime data.

School budgets don’t exist in isolation from other data and they are directly related to other municipal revenue and expenditures. I was able to locate an Excel spreadsheet on the Department of Revenue website that contains historical budget information for the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts and that budget data covers a period from 2000 thru 2009. Yay trending data! While the data exists, visualizations and the ability to easily see budget data for each community didn’t. I put my developer hat on again and used a few simple, free and easy to use tools to convert the Excel data into a CSV that I could then import into the NearbyFYI database. I created a visual representation of how the Watertown expenditures have changed over time.

Watertown, MA budget visualization

At NearbyFYI you can now easily and quickly view trending information for expenditures for all the 351 cities and towns. This view allows the viewer to understand how each community allocates their budgets over time. For example you can see that Belmont, MA has historically spent about 52% of their budget on education while Watertown, MA has been around 37% and Waltham, MA at 42%. I think this visual view of the data helps us to understand the spending priority in each community. I hope to continue exploring the Department of Revenue website to find more data nuggets tucked away in Excel spreadsheets that are begging to be opened up.

One piece of data that is missing in all this is the long term unfunded retirement and pension debt for each community. Watertown has taken exemplary steps to start paying down the pension debt and is at least aware of the unfunded post retirement health care benefits (OPEB) debt, but without understanding how much unfunded debt our neighbors are carrying, looking at how much each town is currently spending only tells part of the story.

In summary
I think we as a community should continue to have conversations about the priority of how we allocate our budgets. Maybe it would help if each citizen were able to create a view of how we envision the pie being carved up. Given the parameters and information available how would you choose to allocate the towns funds? Would you want to see the budget for recreation or fire increase/decrease or how much emphasis should we place on paying down our long term debt?

We should press our officials to take a hard look the spending for each municipal department in the same way that we can look at the school districts. I don’t believe it is fair that we have a wealth of detailed information from our school districts that allow us to perform comparisons but we don’t have a similar way to evaluate the performance and numbers of the library, police, fire, public works, recreation and other departments. How does the Watertown Library stack up (pun intended) against Waltham’s?

Also, we can examine each department with incredible detail, trying to pinch pennies here and there but I believe that we as a community should focus our attention on the municipal employee pension and retirement program and the huge corresponding debt.

If after analyzing the data, and understanding the impact of our current debt we as a community still want to increase the size of the pie for our schools then there are a few questions that I think we should try to answer before increasing the funding:

  1. How is the current school budget distributed among the student population and how does that compare to other communities? I’d like to see a histogram that shows the exact cost distribution per individual student across the entire student population.
  2. If the citizens of Watertown decide to allocate a larger percentage of money for our schools how will we know if we made a good decision?
  3. How does the Watertown School District municipal allocation compare to other districts that are performing well?
  4. And a follow up to #3 – What is the unfunded debt load for those communities we compare with?

What is next?
Next on my todo list is to pull in the U.S. Census Fact Sheet data for each community to see how other demographic data factors into school performance. I’d also love to get access to town/city crime data so that information can co-exist with these other data sets. Another data set that I think is of prime importance is being able to view the unfunded retirement and pension debt for each community.

If you have thoughts about this blog post or comments about what you would like to see included or changed in the NearbyFYI website drop me a line.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Budget, Fire, FOIA, Government, Healthcare, Municipalities, Pensions, Police, Schools, Uncategorized, Visualizations, Watertown | Leave a comment

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

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Matt

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.

Watertown, MA police logs
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

- Hide quoted text -
<trocca@police.watertown-ma.gov> wrote:
> I spoke with our tech person and please refer to the following:
>
> “A file is not sent.  The crimereports.com app pulls what it needs from IMC and uploads the data to crimereports.com.  I have no idea of the format that is uses.  Any data would have to be formatted to something legible to be placed on a document center.  How does the crimereports.com app know to send data to a Watertown document center without the application being rewritten by crimereports.com?”
>
> The only resolution I have for you is to provide our daily log paper documents, which you will then have to create your own spreadsheet for to create the type of computerized reports you are looking for.
>
>
>
>
> —–Original Message—–
> From: Matt MacDonald [mailto:matt.macdonald@gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 9:03 AM
> To: Rocca, Thomas
> Cc: Deveau, Edward
> Subject: Re: Following up on FOIR request for 2010 police reports
>
> Thanks. By the way I can’t remember the name of the person I spoke
> with yesterday in the IT department. Would you mind passing his name
> along?
>
> Thanks,
> Matt
>
> On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Rocca, Thomas
> <trocca@police.watertown-ma.gov> wrote:
>> Matt,  I will review your idea with our IT staff.
>>
>>
>>
>> —–Original Message—–
>> From: Matt MacDonald [mailto:matt.macdonald@gmail.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 8:45 AM
>> To: Rocca, Thomas
>> Cc: Deveau, Edward
>> Subject: Re: Following up on FOIR request for 2010 police reports
>>
>> Hi Captain Rocca and Chief Deveau,
>>
>> 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 tocrimereports.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.
>>
>> I’ve attached a sketch of what this requested change would look like.
>> The sketch can also be found on the internet:
>> https://skitch.com/driki/r62gb/watertown-ma-police-logs
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Matt
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Rocca, Thomas <trocca@police.watertown-ma.gov> wrote:
>>> In order to discuss your request I need you to call me (as stated in my last email) since our cad/rms system cannot produce the data in the format you are requesting.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Captain Thomas Rocca
>>> Watertown Police Department
>>> Bureau Administrative Services
>>> Tel. 617-972-6535
>>> Fax.617-972-6409
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> —–Original Message—–
>>> From: Matt MacDonald [mailto:matt.macdonald@gmail.com]
>>> Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 12:13 PM
>>> To: Rocca, Thomas; Deveau, Edward
>>> Cc: noctice@muckrock.com; info@muckrock.com
>>> Subject: Following up on FOIR request for 2010 police reports
>>>
>>> Hi Captain Rocca and Chief Deveau,
>>>
>>> I haven’t seen an update on the MuckRock website about my request so
>>> I’m following up via email about my freedom of information request for
>>> the 2010 Watertown Police Department reports:
>>>
>>> * Daily Log reports
>>> * Arrest Log reports
>>> * Accident reports
>>> * Incident reports
>>> * Arrest reports
>>>
>>> The entire information request thread can be found here:
>>> http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/watertown-ma/raw-police-blotter-logs-
>>> from-2010/543/
>>>
>>> Would you please let me know when to expect the reports?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Matt
>>>
>>
>

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

Posted in FOIA, Government, Municipalities, Police, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Understanding how to get access to line item police incidents

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

I had a good conversation with Capt. Thomas Rocca of the Watertown, MA Police Department. I recently filed a freedom of information request to the police asking for raw access to the police logs. After a bit of back and forth I now have an understanding of how I might get access to that information in a format other than 1,000 pages of printed paper at a cost of $.50/page. The town uses a Computer Aided Dispatch program called IMC-CAD. I knew that the town had to be able to provide that information in a more useable format as I had come across http://www.crimereports.com and saw that Watertown had incidents reported a few years ago.

The question is how does CrimeReports get that information and can we/I piggy back off of it? Capt. Rocca stated that he didn’t know the details of how the system works but would be directing me to their ‘IT’ staff to help answer my questions. Capt. Rocca said that CrimeReports ‘wrote some bit of software that hooks into IMC to get this’. I believe that whatever CrimeReports wrote as a data processing layer bridge to IMC that raw output should be made public for citizens to use.

After I speak with the IT department for the police department I’ll update with any progress.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in FOIA, Government, Police, Watertown | 1 Comment

What a “Public by Default” government in Watertown, MA might look like

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

What if every piece of information that flowed through the local government in Watertown was easily available for public use on the internet? Imagine if every credit card transaction, tax bill payment, arrest report, library book checkout and student assessment was published in the same way as your credit card bill. How might we as citizens be able to help our town if every aspect of it were public by default?

My name is Matt MacDonald and I moved to Watertown in 2010. I believe that people should and can make a difference in the operation of their local communities but that existing government systems often restrict how we can participate. I’m working to build tools and increase town employee awareness that increased and improved sharing from the town can let software developers like me create new applications that allow citizens to have a more informed, positive and engaged impact on our local governments.

2010 Watertown salary visualization

Our local governments are accountable to citizens and we have existing laws in place that require all information outside of executive privilege to be made available to the people. While these laws exist, in practice our governments are sharing information with the public in ways that haven’t changed to keep up with the rest of the world. While posting a PDF document for a Town Council agenda on the Watertown website may seem ’21st Century’ it isn’t different than nailing a piece of parchment to a post at the horse corral.

I believe we need to radically change the existing system so that we no longer have to file freedom of information requests to access our own information. I can only imagine how we as citizens might be able to help if our local government worked to ensure that everything was public by default.

I have been working to encourage and push our local officials to share information about our town in ways that allow software developers like myself to better present and allow citizens to use that information. If you have used any of the MBTA smartphone apps like OpenMBTA or Catch The Bus you can get a sense of what might be possible if our public services and institutions focused on sharing information.

If you would like to get a taste of what a more open Watertown might look like please visit http://www.nearbyfyi.com/municipalities/1 where you can use the Salary, Revenue and Expenditure Exploration tools to get a greater window into the financial information from our town. At the top of this blog post you can see an example of what we can do when the town data is made public.

While budget and salary information are the easiest bits of information to get access to I hope to keep working with our Watertown employees to share more information and I hope that you will support me in these efforts.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Government, Municipalities, Uncategorized, Watertown | Leave a comment

Suggested criteria for selecting a new Watertown, MA Superintendent

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Matt

With the coming work required to select a new superintendent in Watertown, MA I think we should begin work to narrow our selection criteria down to 5-7 items so as to reduce cognitive load during the decision making process.

I believe that high expectations for students and staff are table stakes and don’t see a need for them to be included in criteria.

Here is my ordered list of 5-7 criteria for a new superintendent:

  1. Creates an active, ongoing, inclusive dialog between parents, students, teachers and administrators
  2. Works to attract, develop and retain the highest quality staff while using peer reviews to identify and help underperforming teachers improve
  3. Seeks financially creative teaching solutions to address the financial challenges our school system faces
  4. Has recent classroom teaching experience
  5. Possesses a deep understanding of the growing challenges Chapter 766 and diversity brings to our budgets
  6. Demonstrates experience working with local governments, school boards and the community
  7. Shows successful experience negotiating with teachers unions

A good set of resources for understanding how to structure questions and criteria so that large groups can make complex decisions can be found from this commercial product: http://www.decisionlens.com/resources/

I’m curious to see what others in Watertown would come up with for their 5-7 criteria.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Municipalities, Schools, Watertown | 1 Comment

Questions about retirement benefits that citizens in Watertown, MA should be asking

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Matt

This is a letter that I sent to Town Manager Mike Driscoll, Town Auditor Tom Tracy and the Watertown Town Council members.

Hi Mike/Tom and Town Councilors,

I’ve been reading a document report from the MMA titled “Retiree Health Care-The Brick That Broke Municipalities’ Backs“.

After reading this document I’m more than slightly concerned about what Watertown is doing to manage the post-employment benefits (OPEB) that the MMA states is ~$118,000,000. I summarized my take on the situation and while I understand that a pay down schedule has been put in place to manage the current $58,000,000 in pension liability I have not yet seen in our budgeting process a plan to manage that massive benefits liability.

There are some questions that I think that the people of the town should have answers to so we can know how our officials and employees are working on this problem:

Data questions:

  1. What is our current OPEB liability?
  2. What does the projected long term growth rate curve look like for health insurance costs?
  3. How many retired members are in the benefit system?
  4. How many active members are in the benefit system?
  5. What has been our annual health care % growth rate over the past decade?
  6. Where are the PDF contracts with the various unions so we can examine the details?

Policy questions:

  1. What are the plans to control these costs and when will they start?
  2. How if at all do our municipal employee benefits plans differ from those that the MMA states
  3. After only 10 years of service, employees are entitled to lifetime health care benefits upon retirement
  4. Retirees are eligible for health care benefits as early as age 55
  5. Municipal employees need only work 20 hours per week to qualify
  6. Retiree health benefits include spouse and dependent coverage
  7. What are the deductibles and co-pays

I’d appreciate a written response so that I can share this information with other citizens.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Government, Municipalities, Pensions | Tagged , | 1 Comment