New crime tracking system available to Chubbuck police and residents

The Chubbuck Police Department recently unveiled a new community dashboard that allows police officers and residents to track crimes and accidents in Chubbuck.

“It’s intelligence-led policing,” Chief of Police Bill Guiberson said. “It’s gonna help us direct our resources, hopefully, to make an impact on crimes in our area and in the end make our community safer.”

Guiberson and his department have only recently begun using the new data-driven crime tracker, which allows them to evaluate the number of specific instances and the frequency with which they occur.

“It’s a whole lot easier than the old way,” Guiberson said. “We really had to have a person here that had that expertise to look into our records management system and sometimes spend hours to look at one piece of data. Now it’s literally a couple of clicks and we have that information.”

New as the system may be, it’s already been put to use to inform the public about some trends, and in one case, the lack of a trend.

“We had somebody call about an area that they perceived was a high volume crash area and we were able to look at that data that was in the system and, in fact, that wasn’t the case,” He said. “We actually hadn’t had a crash in that area for 30 days.”

This new system is also available to regular people like you and me, albeit with less information.

“The community can look at the community dashboard which has limited data, it doesn’t give exact addresses or names and things like that, you know.”

Guiberson said people are often concerned with what they hear maybe going on in their community and this portal, available on the city website, will allow them to see if it’s true or not.

The mapping component of the system is the part of Guiberson likes most.

“Say we want to look at just vehicle burglaries or thefts in a certain area, we can take a look at that data and tell the system what we want to look at and then we can export that into Google Earth, into maps, and then we can kind of look at areas where we need to spend more time on possibly.”

Guiberson added that current budgets give departments like Chubbuck’s a limited amount of resources and that systems like this help ensure they are using them in the best way possible.