Allentown Police unveil public incident dashboard, ask residents for feedback

Chief Charles Roker and the Allentown Police Department demonstrated a new public incident dashboard at the Allentown City Public Safety Committee meeting and invited residents and community groups to provide feedback.

The dashboard, developed with vendor Esri, displays anonymized and aggregated incident data, including the past 24 hours and the previous three months in list form, counts of quality-of-life incidents, incidents by police geography (police service area and beat), violent- and property-crime categories under NIBRS, and filters by date, incident type and time. “This incident dashboard is the culmination of collaboration between our vendor Esri IT and our crime analysts,” Roker said. He added it “provides an increase in transparency and a means for our residents to be informed about the incidents that we have in Allentown.”

Mary Jane Page, a crime analyst with the department, walked the committee through the dashboard’s features: zoomable incident clusters and heat maps, neighborhood geographies, tabs for all incidents and quality-of-life complaints, time-series counts by month and day of week, and the ability to click cluster points to view incident-level details such as date, time, district and report number. She emphasized that this is an “incident dashboard, not a crime dashboard,” and includes non-criminal calls such as alarms and noise complaints.

Officials said the dashboard contains incident data beginning Jan. 1, 2024, and updates daily at midnight; it does not show investigation outcomes or arrests. “Not the results. No. But it does have all the incidents, which not every incident a police officer comes across results in an arrest,” Roker said, adding that when arrests occur the department or the district attorney’s office will put out information.

Council members asked whether the department plans additional dashboards, including traffic or use-of-force data. Roker said the department is interested in creating more dashboards and may be able to do some development in-house with existing crime analysts and IT staff, while noting they would evaluate whether outside work is required. “We are interested and I'm looking forward to doing additional dashboards,” he said.

The chief also described the department’s use of gunshot-detection and license-plate-reading systems through a prior partnership with Flock Safety. He recounted a recent shooting response on the 200 block of North Eighteenth Street that led to swift identification and apprehension of suspects and recovery of weapons. “Within minutes, our officers identified and apprehended the first individual. And within about an hour or 2, we were able to identify and apprehend the second 1, recovering weapons and holding those folks accountable,” Roker said.

Department staff acknowledged performance issues early after launch and said they are working with Esri to address map lag; they also reported more than 5,000 visits to the dashboard in the first two days. Committee members encouraged broader public use, including at libraries and on mobile devices.

No formal committee action was taken on the dashboard; staff sought feedback and signaled plans to expand the toolset over time.