Written by Travis Pryor, Digital Marketing Specialist
Our police departments around the country are being asked to do more than traditional policing as they strive to implement community-policing strategies. Bitwise's newest product, Community Officer is offering police officers just that, a new way to interact with individuals they encounter that need social services.
As community sentiment toward police officers is strained, departments need efficient methods to make and measure referrals and assistance provided to their citizens, or persons in need.
Community Officer is a web-based application, delivered through a smart phone or a browser, that enables police officers to securely and swiftly make trackable referrals to both intra-department and social services agencies.
The result is a new “yardstick”, or metric, by which police departments can measure their community policing success by recording, measuring, tracking and reporting referrals. Unfortunately, police departments are too commonly measured by arrests and shootings – neither a positive metric. With Community Officer, police departments have a new, positive metric for their scoreboard: referrals.
Unlike departments who measure success by arrests over time, police departments using Community Officer quickly distinguish themselves as leaders in community policing with substantiated scorecards representing referrals.
Community Officer is a software-as-a-service solution for police departments seeking to encourage police officers to make referrals to social services agencies, track the disposition of those referrals, and report upon demographic information and referral types. From swift referral tools delivered through smart phones to the rich reporting services found in Community Officer, communities can add empirical evidence to their community policing efforts.
The information contained in the graphs below is purely for illustrative purposes and does not represent an actual city. The visuals are intended solely to be a conversation starter.
Bigcity, ST without Community Officer
- Limited, if any, positive metrics
- All start at zero and go down – few police department metrics start at zero and improve.
Bigcity, ST with Community Officer
- Several new and positive
- Reduced crime - negative metrics decrease due to easier “referral-based policing” vs. arrests.
For more information on Community Officer check out some of our local news coverage.
If there are any questions about Community Officer or the web-based application, feel free to contact us below.
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