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Redwood City launched an overhauled public safety dashboard in June that features a detailed breakdown of arrests, as well as police and fire department activity.
Residents can look up statistics from 2023 to 2026, with data broken down geographically and by incident type, including violent crimes, parking issues, wellness checks and more. Public safety leaders said the dashboard will help make the department goings-ons more transparent. The data will be updated quarterly.
“We want residents to have access to clear, useful information and to feel empowered to engage with us in an informed way,” Redwood City Police Chief Kristina Bell said in a news release.
Jeanne Sullivan Billeci, the city’s contracted spokesperson, said the newly published dashboard had been in the works for more than a year and improves on the previous dashboard by consolidating information from the police and fire departments, as well as allowing users to sift through historical data in more detail. The previous dashboard launched in 2021 after the creation of the city’s Police Advisory Committee.
Users visiting the dashboard are greeted by an introduction page with a broad explanation of how to search through the data and can navigate between three sections: police activity, arrests and fire activity. The police activity tab includes charts showing how many incidents occur in each neighborhood, the most common types of incidents and how the response was initiated, as well as a map of each neighborhood.
The dashboard shows more than 36,700 police incidents through the latest reporting in 2026, and more than 271,500 during the four-year period covered by the dataset. Users can sort the data by year, by neighborhood, by the type of incident and by how the incident originated, including whether the situation was scheduled, started by an officer, through calls to emergency services or through other means.
The dashboard’s “arrest” data includes sex, age and race demographic information, as well as the action taken post-arrest, the incident category and where the incident originated. There have been about 720 arrests so far in 2026, for more than 1,200 offenses. Across the dataset’s three completed years, Redwood City has an average of about 1,500 arrests per year.
Over the dataset’s four-year span, 59% of those who were arrested identified as Hispanic — the most commonly arrested demographic category, despite the city’s population being only 35% Hispanic, according to the 2024 American Community Survey’s five-year estimate. Similarly, about 11% of those arrested identify as Black, despite the city having a 3% African American population.
Billeci said the demographic arrest data cannot be compared to resident demographics, as it includes nonresidents and can record multiple arrests for the same individuals. Non-residents make up about 30% of the city’s arrests over the dataset’s four years.
“Because the datasets measure different populations using different methodologies, they cannot by themselves establish or explain a demographic disparity,” Billeci said in an email. “Arrest decisions are based on the facts of each individual case, available evidence, and applicable law.”
The most common category of arrests is “All Other Offenses,” a catch-all category implemented by the National Incident-Based Reporting System for crimes that fall outside the 81 arrest offenses tracked by the system. The second most common category of arrests are drugs and narcotics violations, which include the possession, use or sale of illegal drugs.
The dashboard has been publicly accessible for about two months. Billeci said the city doesn’t have usage statistics for this specific dashboard because of its arrangement with Microsoft Power BI, but they can see website traffic for the overall Open Data Portal, and there was an increase on the day the dashboard was announced.
“(The dashboard) was created to give residents and other community members a clear, accessible way to explore public safety information in one place,” Billeci said in an email.
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