The Detroit Police Department provides several reports to the Board of Police Commissioners every week, which provide insight into reported crimes, mental health-related calls, ShotSpotter alerts and the department’s use of facial recognition technology.
Navigating through all that data can be complicated. Here’s what you need to know for how to access and interpret crime statistics released by Detroit police:
Crime data reports
These reports can be found in meeting events on the BOPC’s website. To locate them, visit the BOPC website and scroll down to “News & Events.” If you click on an upcoming BOPC meeting, it will bring you to the event page where you’ll find several links to reports. The reports are typically posted a day or two before the next meeting. This is also where meeting agendas and minutes, presentation slides and other reports, are posted each week for BOPC meetings.
Two of the reports – a daily and weekly crime report – provide data for the total number of crimes reported and include comparisons for the previous week, month and year-to-date.
The data provided in these reports is pulled from the Detroit Police Department’s Records Management System (RMS), which is also available on the city’s Open Data Portal where you can find detailed information about reported crimes including the date, time, and general location of each crime and the case status.
The Daily Overview Crime Report provides the total number of reported crimes based on the category and breaks the data down between the east and westside, and by precinct.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program categorizes crimes as Part I and Part II. Part I crimes are considered major crimes and include murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft and arson. Part II crimes include assaults and attempted assaults where no weapon was used, buying or receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud and other non-violent offenses.
The daily crime report also provides data for the department’s response times based on priority level and the number of calls serviced for each precinct.
Calls are dispatched based on priority, with the most serious and urgent calls being priority one calls, and less severe being priority two.
Police response times are broken down into 3 distinct steps – intake time, queue time and travel time. Intake time represents the amount of time it takes dispatchers to process a 911 call. Queue time is the time between dispatch taking a 911 call and an officer being dispatched to the scene. Travel time is the time it takes dispatched officers to travel to the scene. Total response time represents the amount of time it takes the department to receive a 911 call until the police run is closed.
Additional data for police response times is available in “Police Serviced 911 Calls” datasets available on the city’s Open Data Portal .
Similar to the daily report, the Weekly Overview Crime Report provides a one-page overview of reported crimes to show the number of crimes committed with seven – and 28-day and year-to-date comparisons.
ShotSpotter
The department’s weekly ShotSpotter reports provide data for the number of ShotSpotter alerts and the number of shots detected, which is broken down by precinct and includes visual heat maps for each precinct to show locations where gunfire has been detected over the previous month.
Detroit City Council approved a new contract for ShotSpotter in 2022, which expanded the coverage area by 31.8 square miles, following a months-long debate over the city’s use of the technology. Today, gunshot detection sensors are installed in the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 12th precincts.
The most recent report shows that the 9th precinct had 3,274 ShotSpotter alerts so far this year, representing 11,259 shots fired, which is 36% of all gunshots detected in Detroit so far this year. The second highest was the 6th precinct with 1,180 alerts and 3,857 shots detected. 31,205 gunshots have been detected across the city this year.
Mental health calls for service
The department provides a weekly report for mental health-related calls which provides data based on the type of call – mental non-violent, mental violent-armed, mental violent-unarmed, suicide threats and suicides reported as in progress – for the last seven days and year-to date.
The report also provides the number of mental health calls received and the number of calls that were actually serviced. According to the most recent report, the department responded to 87% of mental health-related calls and 72% of overdose-related calls in 2025.
Although the report provides data for overdose-related calls, it doesn’t represent the actual number of overdoses.
Facial recognition
The department provides a weekly report on the number of requests the department made to use facial recognition software to identify an individual. This report includes information about the number of requests that were fulfilled, crimes the department was attempting to solve using facial recognition, how many leads that were produced, the source of the photo used to identify an individual and the race and gender of the individual being identified.
The department has faced lawsuits and public criticism over its use of facial recognition software to identify individuals involved in a crime. The city paid $300,000 last year to settle a lawsuit after a man was wrongly accused of shoplifting based on facial recognition technology, which flagged his drivers license photo as a potential match for an incident that occurred at Shinola in 2018.
The latest report shows that as of Oct. 27, the department has made eight facial recognition requests this year, all of which were for Black males, and seven resulted in no match. Three requests were related to homicides, three were for aggravated assaults, and two were for robberies.
Good info to have. First time checking, but it looks like the next BOPC meeting (tomorrow 11/25) does not have any reports attached. There also doesn’t appear to be a way to look at past meeting reports?
There seems to be an issue with “Police Serviced 911 Calls” as well. The raw data table is available, but nothing appears on the map even when zooming in.