Cherokee Sheriff’s Office: Transforming overdose insights from spreadsheet to strategy

• The Cherokee Sheriff’s Office (CSO) tracks narcotics data on a spreadsheet and historically lacked a way to efficiently model and analyze that data.
• In a matter of hours, Peregrine’s deployment strategists implemented a workflow to automate narcotics tracking and provide deeper insights into overdose data.
• Local law enforcement can now implement targeted, data-driven interventions to reduce overdoses.

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga. — For years, the Cherokee Multi-Agency Narcotics Squad (CMANS) operated with minimal intelligence and analytical support. The task force — comprising representatives from law enforcement agencies in Cherokee and Pickens counties, Georgia — maintained paper case files and lacked the infrastructure to track overdoses, analyze trends, and measure the effectiveness of its interventions.

When Intelligence Division Commander Lindsay Harris joined the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office in 2018, she inherited a daunting but critical responsibility: digitally recording overdose data for Cherokee and Pickens counties. So she started a spreadsheet, where she manually noted information about individual overdoses as calls and reports came in.

Harris soon began noticing patterns and associations in the data, but she still lacked an efficient way to model and analyze it. Enter Peregrine, which has integrated and transformed the CSO’s structured and unstructured overdose data to enable advanced analysis for actionable insights.

Tracking the data

When a CMANS agent responds to an overdose-related call or a road deputy files a report on an overdose, Harris records the details in her spreadsheet tracker, pictured below, by hand. She notes:

• The name, sex, and age of each overdose victim
• The incident date
• Whether the incident was fatal
• Other relevant details, such as the substance used, in a free text field

However, the spreadsheet alone does not provide a way to organize, enrich, and model that data for effective analysis. Before Peregrine, Harris would have had to manually search through pages of information to make connections and identify trends, and she could not have easily analyzed overdose data against other information collected by the sheriff’s office or partner agencies.

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Turning raw data into intelligence

Peregrine now ingests the data from Harris’ spreadsheet and integrates it with information from other data sources across the CSO and participating partner agencies, providing valuable context for each individual incident and for overdose trends more broadly.

Peregrine automates overdose reporting and analysis by populating dashboards, which update in real time as new information is added to the source spreadsheet. Users can filter the dashboards by data points such as date range, victim age, substance, agency, and fatality status — even when the data comes from an unstructured source, such as the spreadsheet’s free text field.

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Turning intelligence into action

Where the CSO and CMANS previously struggled to visualize and analyze its overdose data, analysts can now easily extract actionable insights from it to inform targeted intervention strategies.

For example, when Peregrine indicated that a heroin overdose hotspot was developing in a grocery store parking lot, Harris inferred that there might be a drug dealer nearby. She consulted CMANS’s drug tips to see if she was right.

"We focused our efforts and identified a potential heroin distributor nearby," Harris said. "Subsequently, the dealer was arrested, and this single arrest had a direct impact on the amount of heroin overdoses in that area."

A complete picture of each individual

Peregrine also allows users to drill down to the person level, providing a deeper, more granular understanding of the individuals behind the trends. By integrating data from Harris’ overdose tracker with information from regional agencies’ data sources, Peregrine builds a comprehensive profile of each overdose victim. Users can click into any person’s profile to see:

• Their involvement in the justice system
• Where and with whom they live
• How many times they may have overdosed in the past
• Any 911 calls that came from the site of the overdose at around the same time of the incident
• Information on individuals, vehicles, and objects connected to the overdose victim

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Peregrine also applies its proprietary Match algorithm to these person records, reducing duplications and redundancies. Peregrine Match merges similar records across all integrated sources into a single unified entity. So even if a person entered the system through different departments or under multiple addresses or name variations, Peregrine presents their record as one clean, comprehensive asset.

Better data, safer communities

When valuable data lives in silos — like one-off spreadsheets or disparate tech platforms — it’s harder to understand and action. By integrating those siloed sources in one harmonized data ecosystem, agencies can derive more robust, reliable, and actionable insights from their information. But effective data integration presents complex technical challenges, and not all platforms are up to the task.

Peregrine integrates, cleans, and models both structured and unstructured data — from virtually any system, of any type, and at any scale. The result is a durable, reliable, vendor-agnostic data asset that updates in real time. Contact our team to learn how data integration can streamline analysis and improve community outcomes for your agency.