Case Study: City of Oakland builds police transparency and trust with Slalom's Power BI dashboards

Creating police transparency and trust with data

The City of Oakland sought to implement court-ordered reforms and build public trust after a longstanding civil rights lawsuit, the Riders Scandal, placed its police department under federal oversight. A key unresolved challenge was the inability to effectively track and analyze critical police activity data, such as stops, uses of force, and complaints, with leaders relying on reports that were often two months old. This lack of timely, transparent data hindered the department's progress and accountability. The city partnered with Slalom to address this urgent need.

Slalom developed a solution by creating 15 Microsoft Power BI dashboards hosted on the Azure Government cloud. These tools automatically update daily, providing leaders with clear, current, and secure data visualizations to analyze trends and officer activity. The dashboards saved supervisors significant time, enabled comprehensive oversight, and were praised by the federal monitoring team as the best digital tool for supporting effective policing they had ever seen. Slalom's work provided the Oakland Police Department with an unprecedented level of transparency to accelerate reforms and build trust.

City of Oakland

Andrew “Pete” Peterson

Chief Information Officer