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.

Josh Crawford serves as the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, leading efforts in public safety and re-entry programs. In his work, he addresses the impact of bad policy on violence, cautioning against solely comparing crime rates between 2019 and 2022 as it may overlook the role of policy decisions in exacerbating the issue, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Crawford contends that the pandemic should not be used as a blanket excuse for rising crime rates, emphasizing the need to critically examine and address underlying policy issues contributing to the problem.

Joshua Crawford, Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, discusses in his Wall Street Journal piece how COVID-19 has been used as an excuse for the surge in crime, shifting focus away from underlying policy issues that have exacerbated violence. This topic is explored in a conversation with Rod at 6:05 time mark of the audio file.