Mapping crime in real time: How Peregrine transformed Richmond PD's CompStat

“Peregrine is a huge time-saver. It makes me more efficient by orders of magnitude. Manually collating the data needed for our monthly reports to the city or managing the UCR to NIBRS transition and reporting crime statistics would have been hard – but Peregrine makes it easy.”

Sofia Ayala, Crime Analyst

Richmond PD, California

• Richmond, California’s Police Department uses Peregrine to save hours on producing various reports – for elected officials, the public, and the department’s CompStat meeting.
• Dynamic data visualizations that update in real-time enable analysts to better identify and address crime trends and dig deeper on select crimes.
• Geospatial analysis also supports crime prevention strategies and analysis of quality-of-life issues.

Mapping crime in real time

Every month, the Richmond, California Police Department (RPD) reports crime statistics by city districts. Crime analysts like Sofia Ayala spend hours – often a day or more – collecting data from the department’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and record management (RMS) systems, along with information about citations, traffic collisions, field contacts, and other calls for service, collating them into categories for analysis to support decision-making.

They’re public; you can read the reports online. “These reports help our department communicate with city officials and the public,” Sofia explained. “We’re building trust, aligning on priorities, and showing the progress we’re making on keeping people safe.”

Sofia and other analysts at Richmond do internal reporting, too, every 2 weeks. “We use interactive maps and dashboards in Peregrine for our patrol officers,” she continued. “These reports are our department’s CompStat. We look at a broad range of calls for service in each district, from quality-of-life issues, things like trespassing, to crime trends like robberies or a spike in vehicle thefts. We plot the data on a map, which can help us understand what issues are happening where, why, and what actions our department should take.”

Revolutionizing CompStat

With Peregrine, Sofia and other analysts no longer spend hours cleaning, formatting, and visualizing data. Instead, analysts can quickly and accurately analyze data in real time, producing dynamic reports in minutes. Beyond speed and simplicity, easily plotting data on a map has been a game changer for Richmond’s Police Department.

“We recently had a string of robberies in Richmond over the course of a few weeks. Peregrine allowed us to easily visualize not just where, but when these crimes occurred. Patrol was aware of what crimes happened, and of course we could give them addresses, but a dynamic map that updates in real-time is a completely different – and better – experience for our officers.”

Beyond CompStat

CompStat and public reports aren’t the only kinds of analysis departments like Richmond regularly conduct. Effective January 2021, the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) became the default way to report crime statistics to the FBI. It’s a marked change; departments had been using one framework for decades, only to recently shift to another reporting regime.

RPD explains the difference: “The implementation of NIBRS is expected to provide consistency throughout the U.S. and will bring improved detail and a more transparent approach to crime reporting for the public.”

Without Peregrine, the transition to NIBRS is much more challenging. Sofia would have had to manually download the raw data from the department’s RMS system, then manually plot, filter, and tally crimes, arrests, calls for service, and other data points across districts.

“Peregrine is a huge time-saver. It makes me more efficient by orders or magnitude. Manually collating the data needed for our monthly reports to the city or managing the UCR to NIBRS transition and reporting crime statistics would have been hard – but Peregrine makes it easy.”

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