El Cajon launches interactive homelessness dashboard

The city of El Cajon has launched a new tool it says will allow residents to see, street by street, how the city is responding to homelessness.

With the launch of a new dashboard dubbed “Addressing Homelessness,” officials said they hope residents will have a better understanding of the issue and how the city is addressing it. They also said the tool will help them determine how to allocate funding by assessing which initiatives are making an impact, said Sara Diaz, the city’s director of information technology.

“The idea was to have a public-facing set of metrics because we felt that if we could show in real time what we’re doing, they would understand a bit better,” Diaz said. “We’re trying to tackle this in a multi-faceted way and we thought that putting it in what’s called a ‘story map’ would help us to get some visuals.”

The dashboard includes multiple maps that allow users to interact with homelessness data. For instance, the first map has a slider which can be toggled to show homeless incidents over time, going as far back as 2015. Colored dots on the map signify different types of homeless-related police incidents, such as trespassing, disturbances or illegal lodging.

Another map visualizes clean-up locations throughout the city, with the size of each dot signifying the amount of debris that was cleared from each site.

There is also a heat map which shows focus areas for homeless-related police incidents. Another portion of the dashboard visualizes the amount of time that city police officers have spent addressing related issues.

The project, set to fully launch by the end of the month, pools data from multiple sources on a day-to-day basis. City staff pull numbers from the police dispatch system every night. Data is also collected from the El Cajon Homeless Task Force, as well as from park staff as clearings are completed.

The effort is part of a larger struggle to accurately measure homelessness. When formal tallies are conducted, it is well-known that a homeless person could be missed due to a variety of reasons. The same circumstances could arise for the dashboard.

By collecting data and updating the dashboard on a daily basis, Diaz said residents can have a real-time idea of where homeless encampments are and how the issue is being addressed.

“The data was stale pretty much as soon as we put it out to the public,” Diaz said. “If we could show better in real time what we’re doing, people would understand a little bit better. Sometimes, they see dollar amounts, but they don’t see actions because maybe they’re not out there on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we’re cleaning up. They don’t see the bulldozers of trash coming out of the storm drain.”

The tool aims to boost transparency surrounding one of El Cajon’s most visible and contentious issues.

During the summer, city leaders pushed back on what they called “inflated” homelessness census numbers.

After the regional task force reviewed its count, it was determined that some individuals could have been counted more than once.

By tightening the reins on data collection and public awareness of it, the city can make better informed decisions as to where funds are spent, Diaz said.

“Some areas are getting better, some areas are getting worse, but an honest perspective between the citizens, city staff, elected officials, and everybody having a common picture of what the problem is will lead to better discussions and better solutions,” Diaz said. “We’re hoping to start collecting data from other sources, in order to see if this issue is the same in El Cajon as it is in other places.”

The project is still under development and is set to fully launch by the end of the month. Once it is completely up and running, city officials hope to use it as a guiding force in budget and policy decisions.

“We have some unique factors that could lead to some unique solutions, but we don’t know until we can really see the data, so this is just the start,” Diaz said.