Peregrine 101: Forging community relationships

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.

The challenge

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 record management systems (RMS) that are storing data they were never meant to manage.

In addition to siloed data across multiple systems, “dirty” data, like near-duplicate records — imagine one personnel record says John Smith, and another says John A. Smith, but the rest of the information is the same — poses further complications.

With new regulations and legislation mandating data collection on top of dirty and siloed 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.

Better data, better policing

Peregrine turns this fragmentation into insights driving better policing. Peregrine integrates all of an agency’s data — body worn camera footage, record management systems (RMS), computer-aided dispatch records, and more — into one platform. This allows law enforcement to search, find, and analyze previously unattainable information. With the whole picture, departments can make more strategic, creative real-time decisions to power its operations, share information publicly, and promote accountability.

The vast majority of citizens that live and work in areas of high violent crime are not involved in criminal activity and are 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.

Peregrine equips decision makers at every level with data on these specific drivers, enabling violence prevention efforts to limit violence while building trust.

Law enforcement leadership can be empowered by accurate data on violent crime trends and involved persons to better collaborate with social service organizations and the community on the best approaches for making a positive impact. Patrol officers can have confidence in which approach works best for a given situation — whether it be a potentially violent encounter or interacting with a subject with behavioral health issues — improving calls for service and officer safety. Investigators can have access to every piece of information available on a case, collated and linked, so they can get answers precisely and quickly and ultimately find the insights and connections they need to solve a case.

Transparency at the forefront

The quantity and fragmentation of data has created a problem not just for violence intervention but for public communication and community engagement. Without Peregrine, 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. Before Peregrine, a simple task like reporting crime statistics to the city council took dozens upon dozens of hours. Staff would 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.

Promoting accountability

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.

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.

About Tim Shriver

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.