How data integration helps law enforcement make better decisions
KEY IDEAS:
- Law enforcement agencies need complete, contextualized information to make fast, informed decisions at every level.
- Fragmented systems and point solutions complicate workflows, making it harder for personnel to view, analyze, and act on public safety data.
- Data integration unifies agency systems and delivers real-time insights to command staff, analysts, investigators, and officers in the field.
- Unified data helps agencies allocate resources efficiently, improve officer safety, simplify reporting, and strengthen public trust.
In recent years, many private sector organizations have aggressively adopted data-driven decision-making. There are dozens of companies creating solutions to:
- Store data
- Create and manage data architecture
- Ingest data
- Clean and consolidate data
- Integrate data (i.e., ETL infrastructure)
Public safety organizations don’t need another point solution that adds complexity to essential workflows. They need a way to unify existing technology, streamline operations, and support data-driven decision-making at every level.
For state and local agencies like law enforcement departments, there are comparatively fewer technology solutions specifically catered to their needs and budgetary constraints that help them leverage their data. Communities need efficient and effective public services, but the data infrastructure to enable that lags behind.
🧠 KEY CONCEPT: Point solutions vs. unified data platforms
A point solution solves one specific data problem, such as storage, ingestion, cleaning, or integration. A unified data platform brings data from many systems together so agencies can analyze it, act on it, and use it to support decisions across teams and workflows.
Why public safety agencies need unified data to make better decisions
Public safety agencies need unified data because the amount of information they manage is exploding. New technologies, like body-worn cameras or automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems, produce new data that law enforcement must use and protect. They exist alongside decades-old tools like computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS), and the data produced by these systems and tools do not work well together.
There is more public safety data than ever before, it’s fragmented across dozens of systems, and agencies traditionally have not had a powerful and affordable way to bring it together to underpin decision-making.
Peregrine can dynamically integrate, secure, model, and transform a department’s data. This truly empowers law enforcement officials at every level to better identify problems and craft more effective, data-driven solutions to keep people and their communities safe.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: When CAD, RMS, ALPR, and other public safety systems operate separately, agencies have to search across multiple tools to understand what is happening. Unified data reduces that friction by bringing critical information into one connected view for analysis, reporting, and operational decisions.
How data-driven insights improve resource allocation
Data-driven policing is a proven tool for reducing and preventing crime. Because Peregrine integrates all of a department’s data into one platform and updates it in real time, supervisors can monitor caseloads, assess officer performance, track accountability metrics, and adjust where resources are allocated based on the greatest need and impact.
That can have a significant impact on agencies’ efforts to reduce violent crime. Without these data-driven insights, crime prevention efforts are more broad and less targeted. This is not only inefficient resource allocation, but it can also erode trust between the communities law enforcement serves when visible strategies don’t appear to work.
Peregrine equips decision-makers with data they need, including accurate information on crime trends and involved persons, so they can make intentional choices geared at better safety outcomes for their communities.
Supporting officer wellness with real-time operational insight
Command staff can also use accurate, real-time data to better engage with department personnel and empathetically manage officer wellness issues.
Using hard data to identify officers who've had a lot of exposure to high-stress situations means that leaders can engage with them early to help them balance workload and get them the resources they need. Consideration of officer wellness will also mitigate resource allocation challenges.
💡 HOW DATA SUPPORTS RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND OFFICER WELLNESS
- Enables granular trend analysis
- Reveals where resources are most needed
- Helps identify officers who need additional support
- Supports balanced workloads across teams
READ MORE → Data-Driven Approaches to Enhance Officer Wellness
How real-time information improves officer and community safety
Reliable data helps command staff make strategic decisions about crime prevention, internal operations, and resource allocation. But a unified data platform also ensures that officers in the field can quickly access relevant, time-sensitive insights when they need them most.
Leveraging data to formulate strategies to most effectively reduce crime is vital to keeping people and communities safe. It also makes engaging with communities about those strategies easier and simpler.
Giving patrol officers better context in the field
Empowering patrol officers, who are the direct service providers in cities and towns around the country, can materially improve relationships with a community. Better, holistic crime prevention efforts can only be achieved if patrol officers can access real-time, in-context information when and how they need it.
Imagine officers are called to a scene, and they know in advance that the subject has had prior behavioral health incidents. They will be better able to deploy specific approaches that can effectively de-escalate the situation and get the individual the proper help they need. The same is true of a potentially dangerous encounter — knowing in advance if a suspect has been involved in violent crimes can help them to formulate an effective approach and potentially save lives.
READ MORE → How Menifee PD Improves Officer Safety With Real-Time, Mobile Data
Helping agencies explain decisions to the public
With Peregrine, department leaders can more easily answer questions from community groups or elected officials, such as:
- Why did law enforcement take a certain action in a certain situation?
- Can you explain where and why patrol officers are deployed?
- How are you taking action relative to stated departmental priorities?
Answering those questions requires information that is current, accurate, and easy to explain. Peregrine’s dynamic reports update with real-time information, enabling department personnel to actively decide to share proactive reports on public safety efforts — on an ad hoc or recurring basis — and quickly respond to public records requests.
Improving calls for service with real-time information and proactively sharing data that is driving decisions can materially improve community and department relations. That same foundation also makes reporting faster, more accurate, and easier to share.
💡 HOW REAL-TIME INSIGHTS IMPROVE SAFETY AND PUBLIC TRUST
- Relevant context helps officers prepare, de-escalate, and take informed action
- Connected data helps identify when individuals may need services or support
- Real-time reporting helps agencies explain decisions with accurate information
- Dynamic, digestible reports improve transparency and accountability
How unified data reduces manual reporting and strengthens transparency
Public safety agencies must be able to accurately report on their efforts to local, state, and federal agencies and government entities in addition to the public they serve. This reporting is vital to cultivate nationwide best practices and improve policing. However, valid concerns that data may be inaccurate, incomplete, or include content that should not be disclosed for privacy reasons materially slows both proactive and reactive reporting.
And even if departments were confident in their data, the logistics of collating fragmented information make timely reporting too hard. Without data integration, a simple task like reporting crime statistics to local, state, or federal officials could take dozens upon dozens of hours. Staff must collate the information from various, disparate sources, clean and reform the data, then plot it on a map, then share it. After all that, it’s likely out of date.
READ MORE → How the Richmond Police Department Improves Police Reporting With Real-Time, Unified Data
Data integration solutions like Peregrine simplify internal, public-facing, and government-required reporting. Peregrine has helped several customers convert old UCR to NIBRS data, drastically decreasing the manual hours needed to comply with federal reporting requirements.
Beyond reporting requirements, agencies using Peregrine can collate reports in minutes with high confidence in the accuracy of their information, using it to formulate crime prevention strategies and engage with public officials.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: Better data supports better transparency. Unified data helps public safety agencies:
- Generate reports with greater confidence
- Explain decisions more clearly
- Provide the public with a more reliable view of agency activity
READ MORE → How the Newark Police Department Uses Data Integration to Improve Crime Analysis and Community Engagement
Turning public safety data into an agency-wide asset
Better reporting is one outcome of unified data. The larger opportunity is helping agencies turn every source of information — from new technologies to legacy systems — into an asset that supports decisions across the organization.
Law enforcement agencies will continue to leverage more sources of information from new and emerging technologies alongside legacy systems. Without a plan to effectively integrate those systems, law enforcement will never fully unlock the value of the data departments know they have — but can’t effectively use.
Even the largest agencies, with dedicated researchers validating data sets, struggle with the deluge of data. Peregrine can ensure your department turns its data and systems into everyone’s biggest asset — from command staff and patrol officers to detectives and analysts, and everyone in between.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: Unified public safety data helps agencies move beyond fragmented systems and manual workflows. When information is connected, secure, and accessible, teams across the agency can make faster decisions, improve reporting, support officers, and better serve their communities.
Data-driven decision making made easy, only with Peregrine.
About Morgan Hitzig
Morgan is currently leading operations and growth strategy for Peregrine, a technology platform that empowers public safety leaders to make data-driven decisions in real-time. Previously, Morgan served as Senior Director of Global Operations and Strategic Partnerships at Dataminr, a leading AI business that detects the earliest signals of high-impact events from within publicly available datasets.
A native New Yorker, Morgan was an analyst in the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau where she worked on a broad range of terrorism related issues. Prior to working for the NYPD, Morgan held positions across a variety of industries, including in finance at Bank of America, in journalism at CNN, and at the Scowcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm run by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Morgan is an Officer in the United States Navy Reserve.
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