Streamlining RIPA data compliance
The City of Fremont, located in California, is executing innovative projects in the Information Technology Services (ITS) department. With just a five-person GIS team, the ITS/GIS Division serves 13 departments and nearly 1000 employees. The ITS/GIS Division’s mission is to create strategic interactive mobile and mapping tools to empower stakeholders to collect, analyze, and visualize information, enabling them to make data-driven decisions. Providing a customer service-focused approach and continuously presenting innovative solutions that adhere to best practices, the ITS/GIS Division ensures decision-makers and county partners have access to high-quality data, and all can reference a single source of truth.
Fremont was required to start submitting data for the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) in 2022. RIPA was introduced to help eliminate racial and identity profiling by law enforcement in California. All law enforcement agencies must report person vehicle and pedestrian stop data to the California Department of Justice (DOJ). The data is submitted to the DOJ, analyzed, and after DOJ acceptance is then released publicly. If rejected, it is flagged for correction until accepted by the DOJ. The ITS/GIS Division implemented an ArcGIS Survey123 app for Enforcement Officers, allowing them to collect stop data in a more standardized way.
Fremont soon encountered the challenge of errors in officer form submissions, causing rejections, which required additional and manual corrective action. To remedy this, the ITS/GIS Division created FME QA workflows, as the RIPA data integrates into FME. The workflow performs 12 types of error checks daily, including QA testing, checking for incorrect date or format, missing person data or keywords, invalid location descriptions, javascript errors; and then summarizes the results via an error report along with a submission confirmation email. This automated process enables better decision-making with actionable analytics and transforms three hours of daily manual work into a half-hour automation.
The ITS/GIS Division also developed another FME workflow to onboard new Officers, inform their supervisors, and Helpdesk by sending an automated email providing deadlines and instructions on steps to successfully activate their ArcGIS Online account and how to log in to the RIPA app. Another workflow updates a Command Staff dashboard in near real time. The dashboard has the ability to filter results while providing a single pane view of stop data results with daily, monthly, YTD and Community statistics within Police Zones, Council Districts, and Neighbourhoods, which are among the many statistics available. Yearly, FME helps Fremont save 780 hours on RIPA processes alone.
FME’s versatility for local government innovation
Fremont is also using FME to perform various other tasks and projects, such as data quality checks, data integration, and the creation of interactive web applications and dashboards. The ITS/GIS Division supports the Fremont Fire Department by using FME to create a dashboard summary of applicant location data. Another focus is their DroneSense project, where FME helps feed city addresses including units, streets and street names, and property lines into a drone system, enabling these high-tech first responders to view GIS layers in the live feed.
The ITS department enjoys FME’s no code and automation capabilities and its ability to handle a range of dataset sizes. They have improved efficiency, time management and fulfill interdepartmental requests much faster. ITS is also encouraging and supporting new FME users across other departments. “All this is done through FME, and it’s just a beautiful thing. It’s a great tool that helps staff that already have enough on their plate,” says John Leon, GIS Manager and an avid FME user since 2006. With FME automation of all tasks, Fremont conservatively saves more than 2800 hours each year.
Fremont plans to expand FME into their ProPhoenix 911 project and integrate Cityworks and FME for asset management and onboarding. They’re also exploring a digital portal for AutoCAD drawing submissions from developers where FME will review submissions and create automated reports. FME’s ability to promote efficiency, innovation, and data accuracy in local governments has proven to be invaluable in the City of Fremont’s success with RIPA compliance and other projects.
