Case Study: Dallas County achieves greater transparency and community trust with Tyler Technologies

Dallas PD Rebuilds Trust with Open Data

Dallas County’s police department faced a trust and transparency challenge after a controversial officer-involved shooting and growing public scrutiny. To address it, Dallas County launched an open data initiative and partnered with Tyler Technologies’ Socrata platform to move officer-involved shooting information from static PDFs to a more accessible, user-friendly format.

Tyler Technologies implemented a cloud-based open data platform with interactive reports, maps, charts, and downloadable data. The result was stronger community trust and measurable impact: deadly-force incidents fell 45%, excessive-force complaints dropped from an average of 150–200 to just four in 2016, officer-involved shootings decreased to two from a prior average of 18–25, and open records requests for this data dropped to zero.

Dallas County

David Brown

Former Chief Dallas Police Department