Allentown has been starting the police's dashboard since 2024, which shows crime with crime

Allentown, Pa.-Allentown officials this week started a long-promised dashboard with “very close to real time” data to crime all over the city.

Mayor Matt Tuerk and police chief Charles Roca described the dashboard during a press conference on Tuesday in the city council's chambers, where they welcomed their potential for building trust, transparency and accountability.

The interactive tool has been in progress for more than a year. The start last week was “a conscious step to close the gap between residents and the government,” said Tuerk.

“It is based on the very simple idea that when they can see what happens, we can trust us to do something about it,” he said.

Roca, who took over the top job of the Allentown police in 2021, described the new dashboard “long overdue”.

The APD incident dashboard shows information on almost all crimes reported to the city police and enables the search for incident types and locations.

The locations of the incidents are displayed at the next intersection and no exact address to deliver anonymity, said Roca.

He said the dashboard was updated every evening.

Tuerk said he believes that the dashboard “promotes [a] Safety feeling ”among the residents by better informing them about where the crime takes place in Allentown.

“Historical” data displayed

The mayor was criticized by council member Ed Zupal, his challenger in the democratic primary school on Tuesday.

Until the beginning of 2024, Tuerk and Roca have been dating incidents in the dashboard as the lowest crime and murder rates for years.

Allentown officials said that the city had four murders last year and reported a significant decline in crimes in part I – murder, sexual assault, robbery and serious bodily harm in the past year.

But the dashboard only shows the residents how crime trends have looked “historically” in 2024 since the beginning of allentowns.

It shows no statistics from 2023 – when the city recorded 17 murders – or before.

The Allentown Police Department started reporting crime statistics on the national incident-based reporting system of the FBI last year by asking the officials to collect more geographical data for incidents.

Tuerk and Roca said that they had decided the dashboard with about 18 months of data, since older statistics were not so detailed and would not provide a completely precise picture.

“It is a comparison of apples, but maybe … it's how [comparing] A macintosh to a grandma Smith, ”said Tuerk.

In his administration, officials examine other online dashboards, including one that, according to the mayor, issue the snow ban efforts of the city occupations.