Building the Future of Crime Transparency in Detroit

2025-03-25

“You can’t fix what you can’t see.”

That quote has stuck with me for years — and it’s become the driving force behind this project.

Why I'm Building This

Detroit is an incredible city, but like many urban areas, it's been impacted by issues of delayed emergency response, underreported violence, and a general lack of transparency around public safety.

Rather than complain or wait, I decided to build something that could help.

This app is my answer: a public safety analytics platform that pulls real-time 911 call data and visualizes it in a way that everyday residents, journalists, and community leaders can understand and act on.

What the App Does

At its core, this app answers two big questions:

  1. What’s happening in my neighborhood right now?
  2. How fast is the city responding — and where are the gaps?

It does this by combining:

  • 🧠 AI-powered danger scoring per neighborhood
  • 📍 Interactive map visualizations of 911 heatmaps
  • 📊 Neighborhood-level dashboards and trend breakdowns
  • 🔍 Crime category filters (coming soon: time-based filters and historical comparisons)

Goals for the Platform

Here’s what I’m aiming to accomplish:

  • Empower Detroit residents with real-time data, not outdated PDFs or spreadsheets
  • Hold institutions accountable by showing where response times are lagging
  • Make safety data human — visual, understandable, and actionable
  • Eventually expand to other cities and provide open APIs for activists, journalists, and researchers

What's Next

I’ve got a lot more planned — from user accounts and custom alerts to neighborhood reports and even predictive trends using AI.

This is just the beginning.

If you're reading this and you're:

  • A resident who wants transparency
  • A dev who wants to contribute
  • A community leader looking to collaborate

Reach out. Let’s build it together.

Thanks for following along on this journey. More posts coming soon covering how I built everything — from scraping the data to designing the UX and optimizing response time rankings.