Case Study: Arapahoe County Government achieves revolutionary criminal justice data matching and policy reform with Alteryx

Revolutionizing Criminal Justice Data Analysis

Arapahoe County Government’s criminal justice planning team, led by Todd Spanier with collaborator Kally Enright, faced a persistent challenge: criminal justice data is confidential, siloed across courts, probation, jails, and other agencies, and difficult to match using traditional tools like Excel. To conduct research — for example, calculating actuarial risk for inmates or validating risk-assessment tools — they needed a way to reliably join disparate datasets by individual despite inconsistent formats and poor IT resources.

Using Alteryx Designer (secured through Alteryx for Good), the team employed Join and Data Cleansing tools and built ad-hoc workflows to standardize and match records across court filings, bond reports, supervision details, behavioral health records, and more, with built-in predictive capabilities. The solution enabled validation of pretrial risk scores, evaluation of bond guideline changes, identification of low-risk/high-need clients that led to a funded pretrial supervision program, analysis of racial disparities, juvenile intervention planning, and contributions to criminal justice reform legislation — effectively transforming local criminal justice data analytics.

Arapahoe County Government

Todd Spanier

Criminal Justice Planner