City officials can, for instance, layer fire incident data with property ownership records to identify patterns tied to vacant or neglected buildings. Kristen Bray, Philly Stat 360\u2019s director, said that particular analysis has already informed changes to enforcement strategies targeting property speculators whose holdings may contribute disproportionately to neighborhood instability.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that we have seen in this community is that we have a bunch of property speculators who are buying up properties and leaving them vacant. There is a problem with the population as living unhoused on the streets, because they are using [drugs] openly in the community,\u201d Bray explained in an interview. \u201cThey go into those locations and they start to set fires, be it in the vacant property or into in certain barrels on the street themselves, allowing us to track where those fire incidences happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a 2022 report, the Department of Justice dubbed Kensington \u201cone of the largest illicit drug areas in the country,\u201d and cited several factors, including city management and attempts at mitigation, including increased police presence and stricter enforcement policies, that led to increased reports of drug activity and criminal behavior in the area.<\/p>\n
Last year, one year after she was elected mayor, Parker declared a public safety emergency<\/a> to \u201cpermanently shut down all pervasive open-air drug markets,\u201d and called for a 100-day plan to address the conditions that allow this criminal activities to thrive in Kensington.<\/p>\n Bray said the dashboard builds off Parker\u2019s previous initiatives to revitalize the neighborhood, including establishing a 24\/7 incident command center and a Kensington Neighborhood Wellness Court, an initiative that offers people facing misdemeanor charges associated with public drug-use services like same-day physical and behavioral health assessments. The city began also more tightly regulating mobile services, such as food distributors and mobile medical care.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was created as part of Mayor Parker\u2019s vision to give individuals a government they can see, touch and feel,\u201d Bray said. \u201cWe are mapping those issues so residents can see the same things city leaders are seeing in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n The Kensington dashboard is organized into four categories \u2014 community, public safety, quality of life and wellness \u2014 with much of the data pulled directly from agency systems, including police, behavioral health, licensing and inspections, and streets. Bray said the city connected those systems through a centralized data layer that is frequently updated, but that also ensures privacy protections and that the data is validated.<\/p>\n \u201cReal time accountability is incredibly important, because if you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on in the background in real time, you can\u2019t fix it,\u201d Bray said.<\/p>\n She said her office formally began planning the dashboard last year following a series of meetings with the community, which she said helped shape what appears on the platform: The office \u201cstarted to discover things that were much more important to the community than maybe what government initially thought.\u201d<\/p>\n City leaders initially prioritized enforcement metrics tied to Kensington\u2019s widely publicized open-air drug market<\/a>, but residents pushed for broader visibility into neighborhood resources and community activity. As a result, the dashboard includes features like a shared events hub for local organizations, for residents who wanted better coordination across community groups, alongside more traditional government metrics.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not solely a police problem, you can\u2019t arrest your way out of it,\u201d Bray said. \u201cThere is a number of different factors that go on in every community that lead to a sense of disorder, and if you\u2019re not bringing every city resource to the table to try to solve that disorder and improve it, you\u2019ll never be able to solve complex issues like what is happening in this community.\u201d<\/p>\n
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