HUTTO, Texas (KXAN) — As the City of Hutto continues to grow, the police department is bringing on a crime analyst to help the department stay proactive in the fight against crime.
“As our city grows one of the biggest issues we’re seeing are crimes of opportunity,” Chief Jeffrey Yarbrough said. “For example, when you have residential areas, subdivisions, new businesses going in, people may go into those communities and see building materials… or see new residences being built and they may go in there to try and find appliances.”
He said the city approved funding for the crime analyst position during the latest budget approval process. The department started interviewing applicants around Thanksgiving.
“Geofencing around certain areas and do some mapping to see where our hot spots are so we can do targeted patrols and mitigate some of the issues,” Yarbrough said about the goals of the position.
In addition, the crime analyst will create public-facing data dashboards.
“By having that published, we can engage with the community more and we can actually become partners in securing out safety,” said Lt. Josh Bellenir. He said the portal will include heat maps and various charts organizing the crime data.
The department hopes to have the public-facing website up by the end of January.
Austin police launched new data portal earlier this year
In Austin, new crime statistics have been available for most of the year in interactive dashboard form on the APD’s data portal.
APD has a new data dashboard – is it reliable?
Dashboards outlining the following topics are currently available:
- Major crimes
- Cadets in training
- Retirements and separations
- Calls for service
- Response times
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