City of OKC

Recommendation No. 6:

OKCPD should provide publicly-facing aggregate statistics of officer activities.

OKCPD should provide publicly-facing aggregate statistics – in dashboard and raw format – of officer activities, including use of force.

Project Status: On Hold

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Project Details from Consultant Report

Transparency was a concern for community. One community member said, “I think serious questions need to be asked about what they are measuring and if those measures are what demonstrates the kind of policing we want in our community.” As one high-ranking police official noted, “misinformation is part of the issue—we need to do a better job of telling our story and a better job being transparent.”

On its website, OKCPD provides its policy manual (in a single PDF file), a community crime map and summary crime statistics, and an outline of how OKC practices align with the 8 Can’t Wait core principles. The City provides information about emergency responses and OKCPD facilities on its Open Data Portal.

21CP recommends that OKCPD provide close to real-time data on core officer activities, like use of force and stops and searches, in addition to crime data. Peer agencies provide this level of transparency and OKCPD should consider joining them. Additionally, as recommended elsewhere in this report, we recommend that OKCPD proactively publish data relating to internal affairs investigations.

OKCPD should work to favor transparency and openness with respect to its activities and performance so that it can partner with the community – in the ways that it wants – to advance public safety and community well-being.

To the department’s credit, during the pendency of this assessment, the department greatly expanded its reporting on use of force and Professional Standards statistics in its annual report, including type, frequency, and dispositions. This is an excellent first step in transparency, but ultimately annual reports are static and cannot, by their nature, be presented in real-time.

Ideally, OKCPD would push data directly from systems of record automatically to dashboards that present such data and also provide data in summary format to “crowd source” research on trends. Both the community and the City would benefit from such opportunities.