Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg will hold a press conference Tuesday, introducing a real-time, comprehensive reporting tool that will expand information transparency on the city’s crime statistics.
A media release said the dashboard aims to create more collaborative work opportunities with and within the Louisville community.
“As a general rule, more data and more transparency is a good thing,” said Joshua Crawford, the Director of Criminal Justice at the Center of Opportunity.
Crawford sees a lot of benefits with this new dashboard. One of them being allowing people to see the reality of violence in the city.
“One of the things that people get wrong is that they think entire neighborhoods are riddled with violence,” Crawford said. “What a dashboard like this can demonstrate is that there are parts of the city people may feel uncomfortable being in, but there’s really not a reason to be uncomfortable because they’re not as violent as people perceive them to be.”
That’s not to say that there isn’t violence in the city. LMPD says there’s been 140 homicides so far this year.
Crawford said the violence happens at the micro location level.
“So at the one block street segment level, or at the outside of particular bar level, or the outside of particular abandoned buildings level,” he said.
Crawford says it’ll not only benefit people to know where there’s a history of violence, but also it might ease some concerns.
“To know that a particular area is not nearly as violent or criminogenic as you thought has benefit as well,” Crawford said.
With people being able to see all the information in real time, we asked Crawford if the areas with a higher level of violence will be ostracized.
“I think that’s only possible if you don’t do anything about it,” he said. “If it continues unabated then it may have that problem, but that’s a failure of government as much as it is this dashboard.”
Crawford said officials need to send services and resources to areas of violence to help the citizens in those places.
