Crisis Contacts Data
Why SPD Provides Crisis Contact Data
As part of the Police Foundation's Public Safety Open Data Portal we are publishing this information to highlight transparency around our policy, process, and training with regards to police interactions with members of our community experiencing behavioral crisis.
Working to maintain public trust is one of our core principles. It is within this spirit that we are sharing data representing the nearly 10,000 mental health contacts reported annually. Our officers answer hundreds of thousands of calls annually. The vast majority are calls for service and are resolved routinely. In cases where a member of our community is experiencing behavioral crisis, either as a result of a traumatic event, a mental health condition or a response to substance use, officers are required by police to document that interaction on a Crisis Template.
The data and the visualization located here represent those events. The Department provides this data with the hope of providing greater transparency of our practices in turn creating more opportunities for us to work collaboratively with the community to drive Department policies and priorities. SPD has taken great care to ensure that the need for transparency is appropriately balanced with the need to ensure that the data release does not interfere with the privacy interests of the individuals involved. Consistent with the City's Open Data and Privacy Policies, all datasets posted to the City's Open Data Portal are subject to a thorough three-part privacy review.
More About Crisis Contacts
Under policies and procedures developed in collaboration with the Department of Justice and implemented in January 2014, all contacts with people in crisis are documented and thoroughly analyzed. Since 2016, the department has reported annually on these data and in keeping with our policy of transparency, we are releasing most of the data used to write that report. As we learn more about our interactions with the community, we grow and improve. We invite you to explore the data with us.