Austin City Council to vote on police data expansion

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Some Austin City Council members want more robust and frequent data from the Austin Police Department.

Council will vote on a resolution Thursday that would ask the police department to post monthly data on its portal including the following:

• Demand for police services, including call type, priority level, how fast a unit arrived and number of officers for every call
• Mental health services, including a list of mental health calls resulting in serious bodily injury or death
• Supply of police services, including number of personnel, overtime hours worked and number of retirements each month

If approved, that data would be published on the city's existing Open Data Portal starting in March of 2024 and would include data for the previous 36 months. It would be updated monthly, if passed as written.

According to the author of the resolution, Council Member Chito Vela, it could help guide policy decisions on things like staffing shortages, response times and mental health calls.

"I want our public safety conversation to be data driven, I don't want it to be driven by anecdotes, or you know, the horrible thing that happened last weekend, I want to talk about larger trends," Vela said.

An assistant professor of law at the University of Texas Austin said compared to many other departments, APD is actually ahead when it comes to data. But also said council and the public having more information to make policy decisions is a net positive.

"The city council has been issuing various resolution over the years expanding Austin's data collection and so the department already publishes a lot of data about stops, use of force incidents, calls for service," Maria Ponomarenko said. "This is really just an expansion of that data collection effort."

"We look forward to the discussion and direction that will be provided," APD said in a statement.