Diffuse information, overlapping departmental spending, buried data and complex budgetary processes can lead to a lack of transparency of police and public safety spending. But thoughtfully constructed police budget dashboards can open the door to increased community understanding, according to a September 4 Urban Institute report, “Democratizing Public Safety Budget Data”. 

This practical guide provides a wealth of advice on how communities can create digital dashboards that increase understanding of police budgets that are often “complex and opaque.” Advice in the report stems from the research of three local organizations, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute in Washington DC, Community Information Now in San Antonio, Texas and the Polis Center in Indianapolis. To see the 2026 version of the San Antonio Police Department budget dashboard, click here. 

In each case, these groups constructed public dashboards that could be used by communities to explain the budget process, define terms, explore different areas of spending and help to unravel the many complexities in the way police budgets unfold.

The aim: To offer local government and community-based groups “practical insights for improving the accessibility and community understanding of public budgeting information.”

As the report explains, a compelling police budget dashboard provides multiple kinds of information that would include: 

• The difference between budget proposals, final budgets and actual spending

• Ways to explore trends in police budgeting over time.

• Approaches for successfully visualizing budget data

• Interactive ways to explore selected topics, such as spending on training, or the breakdown of law enforcement officers and civilian employees. 

To increase transparency and community understanding, also requires the need to:

• Engage the community through such methods as town halls, social media, surveys and focus groups.

• Understand the data needed outside of the police budget, since public safety “will likely be held across multiple agencies,” and may also involve “internal databases, procurement systems and annual city budgets.”

• Consider how to update dashboards so that the data collected in one year can be updated as time advances.

Creating a useful dashboard

The report maps some of the key elements that were critical in each of the three community projects studied. To start, the report emphasizes the need to think clearly about the goals of the budget tool and who the audience is. To that end, it points out the importance of tapping community views of the metrics that are of special interest, and assembling a workable development team, with an eye toward different project roles, analytic expertise and partner relationships.

Beyond the involvement of community-based organizations is the need to engage local law enforcement, elected officials, and “other government leadership to ensure those with decision-making power over public safety budgets are bought in.”

The report notes that decisions abound as the budget tool is developed. This includes whether and when to utilize nominal or inflation adjusted costs and decisions of when to contextualize costs with attention to population changes or “by comparing them with crime rates, response times and community safety outcomes, such as clearance rates.” 

The report also presents some of the difficulties of collecting usable data. This includes advice on dissecting and extracting information from PDFs to increase understanding of funding changes over time. Though it cautions about the need for quality control, it notes that “AI tools can help identify budget data in PDF files and pull the data from those files into more usable formats. The aim: To offer local government workers and community-based groups “practical insights for improving the accessibility and community understanding of public budgeting information.”

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