Peregrine 101: How unified data helps agencies reduce violent crime
Author
Tim Shriver
Vice President, State and Local Government Innovation
Peregrine
Published
January 10, 2023
Last Updated
June 10, 2026
Author
Tim Shriver
Vice President, State and Local Government Innovation
Peregrine
Published
January 10, 2023
Last Updated
June 10, 2026
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KEY IDEAS:
- Law enforcement agencies often rely on fragmented data systems, making it harder to identify patterns, uncover trends, and understand the drivers of crime.
- Without targeted crime prevention strategies, agencies may default to broader enforcement approaches that can strain community relationships.
- Data integration helps agencies unify siloed data, add context to crime statistics, and make faster, more informed decisions.
- Peregrine helps agencies turn unified data into more focused crime prevention strategies, stronger accountability, and greater public trust.
Police agencies looking to reduce violent crime have traditionally had to apply broad enforcement strategies, which can unintentionally impact entire communities. Without a way to uncover and target the main drivers of crime, agencies risk jeopardizing relationships with these communities and eroding public trust.
When police data is fragmented across siloed systems, agencies aren’t able to identify patterns, add context to crime statistics, or develop focused prevention strategies to reduce violent crime. A data integration solution like Peregrine changes that. Data integration harmonizes information across systems, delivering a unified platform that helps leaders ask data-informed questions and develop long-lasting solutions.
Peregrine is the first decision infrastructure platform that enables public safety personnel to make better decisions in every high-leverage moment. By better leveraging existing information and connecting the dots between siloed data, law enforcement can improve policing, transparency, and accountability efforts to forge deeper community relationships.
🔎 WHAT IS PUBLIC SAFETY DATA INTEGRATION?
Public safety data integration connects information from systems like CAD, RMS, body-worn cameras, ALPR, and other agency tools into a unified view. This helps personnel identify patterns, understand context, and make more informed decisions about crime prevention, reporting, and accountability.
Police departments have been inundated with data, often siloed in fragmented systems. In recent years, police departments have responded to new and varied challenges with new technologies like body-worn cameras (BWC) and automated license plate readers (ALPR). These new technologies collect data alongside decades-old legacy systems like computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS) that are storing data they were never meant to manage.
In addition to siloed data across multiple systems, “dirty” data poses further complications: Imagine one personnel record says John Smith, and another says John A. Smith, but the rest of the information is the same. These near-duplicate records can cause confusion and prevent personnel from connecting people, vehicles, and incidents.
CASE STUDY → How the Newark Police Department Uses Data Integration To Improve Crime Analysis and Community Engagement
With new regulations and legislation mandating data collection on top of siloed and dirty data, the status quo of policing presents a novel challenge — departments are managing more data across more systems than ever before, without a way to bring it together or quickly and efficiently get answers to their questions.
That negatively impacts an agency’s ability to reduce violent crime. The vast majority of citizens that live and work in areas of high violent crime are not involved in criminal activity; they’re often the victims of violent crime. Without data-driven insights on the specific drivers of crime, law enforcement violence prevention efforts are often geared towards an entire community, which can erode trust and potentially make violence worse.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: When police data is fragmented, agencies may struggle to identify the specific drivers of violent crime. Unified data helps agencies develop more targeted strategies that focus resources where they are needed most.
Data integration turns this fragmentation into insights that drive better policing. Data integration helps agencies bring all of their disparate information sources together, helping personnel identify trends and hotspots, monitor real-time crime trends, and develop targeted intervention strategies.
Peregrine integrates all of an agency’s data — body-worn camera footage, RMS data, CAD records, and more — into one platform. This allows law enforcement to search, find, and analyze previously unattainable information. With a more complete picture, departments can make more strategic, creative real-time decisions to power their operations, share information publicly, and promote accountability.
READ MORE → How the Atlanta Police Department Reduced Violent Crime by 21% With Data-Driven Policing
Peregrine equips decision makers at every level with data on these specific drivers, enabling crime prevention efforts to limit violence while building trust:
Unified data helps law enforcement agencies increase real-time awareness, develop holistic crime prevention strategies, and improve officer safety in the field.
🔎 HOW DOES DATA INTEGRATION HELP AGENCIES ADDRESS VIOLENT CRIME?
Data integration gives agencies a more complete view of the people, places, patterns, and conditions connected to violent crime. With unified data, personnel can identify trends, focus resources, improve officer safety, and take faster, more informed action.
The quantity and fragmentation of data has created a problem not just for violence intervention but for public communication and community engagement. Without integrated data, valid concerns that data may be inaccurate, incomprehensive, or inclusive of private content materially slows both proactive and reactive reporting to the public.
Even if departments were confident in their data, the logistics of collating fragmented information make reporting too hard. Without Peregrine, a simple task like reporting crime statistics to the city council 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.
With Peregrine, departments can collate reports in minutes with high confidence in the accuracy of their data. Peregrine’s dynamic reports update with real-time information, enabling police to proactively report on public safety efforts on an ad hoc or recurring basis — and quickly respond to public records requests.
This capability fosters trust between law enforcement agencies, the communities they serve, and the elected officials that represent them.
💡 HOW DOES DATA INTEGRATION INCREASE TRANSPARENCY IN REPORTING?
Without integrated data:
- Fragmented or “dirty” data can reduce reporting accuracy.
- Privacy concerns can slow data sharing and public reporting.
- Staff may need to manually collect, clean, and format data from multiple systems.
- Seemingly simple reports can take dozens of hours.
- Delayed reporting may rely on stale or outdated information.
With Peregrine:
- Cleaned and deduplicated records improve reporting confidence.
- Granular permissions help agencies securely control what information is shared.
- Personnel can create reports and visualizations in minutes.
- Real-time data supports ad hoc and recurring public safety reporting.
- Timely, digestible reports help agencies communicate more transparently.
READ MORE → How the Richmond Police Department Improves Police Reporting With Real-Time, Unified Data
Finally, police accountability has been a central stumbling block to building community trust. If communities demand timely information and action, and siloed, fragmented data makes it hard for law enforcement to provide, frustration on all sides will inevitably result.
Peregrine enables agencies to investigate and understand alleged incidents of misconduct. Leadership can place these incidents in their immediate and historical context, easily surfacing case files, dispatch narratives, and camera footage to understand what led up to an incident and what happened immediately after.
🔎 HOW CAN CONNECTED DATA SUPPORT POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY?
Connected data helps agencies review incidents with more complete context. By bringing together case files, dispatch narratives, camera footage, and related records, leadership can better understand what happened, explain decisions, and communicate more transparently with the community.
With immediate access to all the data pertaining to an incident and the ability to contextualize that data about a given scene or an officer’s career, leadership can confidently communicate with their community and explain their decisions transparently during moments following major incidents.
Forging relationships between police and the community can be difficult, made more challenging by the modern burden of fragmented, hard-to-access data. Peregrine alleviates this burden, helping departments forge positive, trustworthy relationships with their communities.
A former educator and non-profit executive, Tim Shriver became passionate about public safety innovation during law school where he studied under leading scholars of policing and privacy, worked in state and local government policy, and served in the Department of Justice. At Peregrine, Tim focuses on assuring our platform strengthens protection of privacy and civil liberties and advances public safety within and beyond policing.
Crime prevention strategies are more effective when they are based on complete, timely, and contextualized information. When data is siloed, agencies may struggle to identify emerging trends, understand hotspots, or connect related incidents. Unified data helps personnel move from broad enforcement approaches to more targeted strategies that can improve public safety while reducing unnecessary impact on communities.
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