HARRISBURG — Which crimes are most common in the county where you live? How many intoxicated drivers have been arrested on the highways you travel? Do distracted driving crashes happen frequently near your child’s school?
When crimes and crashes are investigated by Pennsylvania State Police (PSP), the statistical data is available online through the Community Access to Information Dashboard (CAID), which Pennsylvania State Police launched one year ago with the goal of increasing transparency related to their crime, crash and enforcement data. The dashboard contains no information that could be used to identify the individuals involved. Queries can be made in the dashboard with statistical information from as far back as 2019.
“This tool allows for residents, visitors and members of the media to access PSP statistical call data with a few clicks,” said Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Robert Evanchick. “Public access to crash, enforcement and crime data is now easier than ever.”
Visit the Community Access to Information Dashboard at bit.ly/PSP-CAID. The dashboard can also be accessed by visiting www.psp.pa.gov and clicking on the “Data” icon, and then clicking on “Launch the Dashboard” at the bottom of the page.
CAID allows the public and the media to access and search data collected from traffic enforcement and crashes for both commercial and noncommercial vehicles, including Incident maps. There’s also data concerning various crimes, with mapping for counties and municipalities.
The dashboard allows the user to choose what data is displayed. Searches can be refined with custom date ranges, locations and categories.
For example, to see trends of deer-related crashes in the Harrisburg area, users would go to the CAID website, bit.ly/PSP-CAID, and select Crash and Enforcement Data. Setting a date range of Oct. 1 to Nov. 30, 2021 and narrowing the search to Dauphin County shows deer on roadways contributed to 46 crashes investigated by PSP in those two months, more than half the 87 total deer-related crashes in all of 2021.
In a second example, someone investigating where most commercial vehicle crashes occur in Pennsylvania could go to Commercial Vehicle Crashes and select Crash Maps. PSP statistical data shows that Dauphin, Cumberland, Lehigh, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties consistently had the most crashes each year from 2019 through 2021.
Selecting Enforcement under Commercial Vehicle crashes indicates that when PSP carried out 23,595 commercial vehicle inspections in those five counties over those three years, violations were found 88% of the time, or during 20,875 inspections.
PSP welcomes public feedback on how to make the interactive database even better. The “Contact Us” button at the top of the dashboard allows users to submit suggestions for enhancements.
For more information on the Pennsylvania State Police, visit psp.pa.gov.
