APD says open-data portal 76% complete; HR system rollouts slow final datasets

Austin — Ozzy Krobach, information-technology manager for the Austin Police Department, told the Austin City Council Public Safety Committee on June 2 that the department’s open-data portal is about 76% implemented and that 16 of 21 datasets required under a 2023 council resolution are publicly available.

Krobach said five remaining datasets are delayed because the APD is not the authoritative source for some data elements. “We are kind of paused at this point with these datasets in order to await the data warehouses for these datasets, which are now collecting the authoritative data,” he said, referring to upcoming human-resources systems UKG and Workday.

The unresolved datasets include sworn and non‑sworn assignments, overtime hours by individual, overtime expenditures by activity category, citations and tickets, and a “stop and release” dataset that relies on unstructured narrative text. Krobach said citations currently flow from citation devices to the municipal court system and that APD is working on identifying an e‑citation device and a custodial arrangement so the department can be the record custodian for citation data.

Community members and council members have pushed for more granular location information in crime reports, such as X/Y coordinates and addresses. Krobach cautioned that exposing precise coordinates can disclose sensitive information about victims. “This is the worst day of somebody’s life, and we want to be really conscientious that we’re not collecting their information because they wanted to volunteer it to us,” he said, adding the department is exploring ways to ‘jitter’ coordinates so researchers can study patterns while preserving privacy.

Krobach said the resolution’s drafters included census block groups as a geographic field, and that most datasets already include it. He said the portal currently provides a map showing census block groups and training aids to help users look up and filter by that field, but acknowledged the interface is not yet as seamless as the city would like. He said APD has moved the data hosting from central CTM to CTM Public Safety to gain closer technical support for records-management and computer-aided dispatch systems.

Committee members asked for additional metrics and documentation. When asked about portal usage statistics, Krobach said the data are available but that he would follow up with specifics and with the presentation slides used for the briefing. The committee also raised neighborhood-level and alternative geographies such as census tracts or school-feeder patterns so that data can be consistently applied across the city — including areas that are not in neighborhood associations.

Krobach said APD has received community requests for historical use‑of‑force rows (2018–2019) and traffic stop data and confirmed work is ongoing on the traffic-stop dataset. He also said the department provides an email (APD Open Data Assets at austintexas.gov) for public feedback and that staff are weighing whether requests should be handled through the open-data portal or as public‑records requests.

Krobach and committee members agreed to follow up with delivery of the presentation backup and portal usage statistics. The committee moved on to other agenda items after the briefing.

The briefing referenced city council resolution 2023-0914-132, which directed the department to publish specified datasets; Krobach said he was hired after the resolution passed and has been leading implementation work since then.