Building Better Early Intervention Systems

This article features the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police Department's (CMPD's) Early Intervention System (EIS). CMPD and the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Science and Public Policy (DSaPP) joined forces to build a better EIS. CMPD has been a technology leader in the public safety sector, building a centralized data warehouse and much of its own software. DSaPP has expertise in building predictive systems for nonprofits and governments, working with dozens of schools, social service agencies, hospitals, departments of public health, and more.6 Together, the researchers analyzed the performance of CMPD’s current EIS, then used advanced analytics to build a new EIS prototype. The prototype EIS appears to be a great start in changing how CMPD addresses employee issues. Preliminary results suggest the new system increases the odds of flagging officers who will be involved in an adverse incident in the next 12 months. Equally important, it reduces the number of officers who were flagged but did not go on to have an adverse incident in the next year. CMPD and DSaPP are conducting a field trial of this system and building tools to ready it for use.


Author: Crystal Cody, Estella Patterson, Jennifer Helsby, Samuel Carton, Kenneth Joseph, Ayesha Mahmud, Youngsoo Park, Joe Walsh, Lauren Haynes, Rayid Ghani, and Kerr Putney

Publication Date: 2016

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