ResourceRouter™ Frequently Asked Questions

Today’s law enforcement executives are facing budget and accountability pressures and need precision-policing tools to maximize their resource efficiency and promote more positive community engagement. ResourceRouter is a patrol and analyst tool that automates dynamic patrol location forecasts for all Part 1 crime data across an entire jurisdiction daily, enabling patrol and task force units to deter crime in a more precise and impactful way while also improving community engagement.

Better Information: Review dynamic patrol location forecasts, precise risk assessments. and pre-patrol briefings, facilitating optimal outcomes even with limited staffing and resources.

Better Decisions: Prevent crime and social disorder using the least amount of enforcement necessary and in partnership with the community.

Better Outcomes: Maximize crime deterrence and improve community relations by enabling command staff and line-level supervisors to apply the right dosage of policing in the right places at the right times.

ResourceRouter does not model misdemeanor or nuisance crimes that are more susceptible to enforcement bias. Specifically, it models the major crimes that have an outsized impact on the community:

• Part 1 Crimes: Gunfire, homicide, aggravated assault/battery, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and theft.
• ResourceRouter will not model crimes that are largely susceptible to enforcement bias.

• Yes, crime forecasts can be configured based on those crimes of interest to a police department. For larger agencies, each district or special enforcement unit may have their own crime type priorities and that can be easily accommodated.
• A separate risk model is created for each crime type enabling the technology to have a unique configuration for each agency and their jurisdictions that use it.
• However ResourceRouter will not model crimes that are largely susceptible to enforcement bias.

SoundThinking seeks to reduce crime with its solutions, but that capability alone is not enough to make a public safety solution of benefit to a community. The product must provide more benefit than harm. The company has incorporated technology and policy protections to mitigate bias and discrimination yet still yield a significant public safety benefit. These protections include:

• We use crime data that is least susceptible to bias – Our models only use data for crime types that are typically called in from the community and not driven by police presence. We exclude misdemeanor and nuisance crimes that can create negative feedback loops with enforcement bias. These loops can occur in other modeling approaches when police presence in an area can repeatedly return police to the same area.
• We supplement crime data modeling with non-crime data and exclude people data – We also work to reduce bias by supplementing reported data with multiple sources of relevant data from independent, open sources. Typical examples include seasonality, time of month, day of week, time of day, holidays, upcoming events, weather, and locations of liquor establishments.
• We maximize the reduction of harm – We do not make predictions about the actions of people – that means no arrests, social media, or personal data is used. We limit the time an officer patrols and the occurrence of patrol assignments in the same location to prevent over-patrolling.
• We prioritize oversight and accountability – We log data input used and outputs generated by each model. We also log patrol activities including time, place and tactics used.
• We are proactively transparent – We are committed to being transparent about how our system works and use third parties to provide objective assessments.

SoundThinking offers:

–     ShotSpotter® , an innovative gunshot detection technology that enables law enforcement to proactively address gun violence and arrive at a scene within minutes, saving lives and building community trust in the process.

–    CrimeTracer™, the #1 law enforcement search engine that enables investigators to search through more than 1B structured and unstructured data across jurisdictions to obtain immediate tactical leads, leverage advanced link analysis to make intelligent connections, link NIBIN leads to reports, suspects, and other entities, and more.

–    CaseBuilder®, a smarter investigation management platform that enables investigative teams to efficiently organize and store case information, track and prioritize assignments, optimize resources, submit materials to prosecution, and more.

–    CaseBuilder® Crime Gun, the first-of-its-kind gun crime tracking and analysis case management tool that enables agencies to better capture, track, prioritize, analyze, and collaborate on incidents that involve firearms.