Power BI dashboards for police departments
Most small agencies already own the tool. If your county or city runs Microsoft 365, Power BI is sitting in the tenant, paid for, and nobody has the fifteen spare hours a week it would take to build something real in it. So the monthly command staff packet still gets assembled by hand, and when the city manager asks for calls by beat it takes two days to answer.
Blue Peak Data Consulting builds those dashboards for police departments of roughly 20 to 200 officers. A written scope, your data staying inside your own Microsoft tenant, and the finished file handed over so your analyst can change it without calling us.
What gets built
A first project is usually one or two of these rather than all of them.
Calls for service
Volume by hour, day, beat and priority, with response and clearance time shown as a distribution rather than one average. This is the view that answers staffing questions.
Incidents and arrests
Offense counts, clearance status, arrest demographics, repeat addresses and repeat callers, filtered to any date range without a new export.
UCR and NIBRS category reporting
Your incidents rolled up into the categories your state submission uses, so the dashboard number and the submitted number come from one definition. When the state file and the local count disagree, the report shows you where.
Shift and beat workload
Officer initiated versus dispatched activity, unit hours committed by beat, and the shift to shift comparison asked for every time a schedule changes.
Monthly command staff reporting, automated
The recurring report that eats a week of somebody’s month becomes a scheduled refresh and an export. Same layout, same definitions, produced on the first without anyone rebuilding it.
A public transparency view, if you want one
A separate, aggregated report carrying no case level detail, published only if and where your agency decides. Always its own decision and its own deliverable.
Where the data comes from
Your RMS or CAD export
We do not need direct access to your records system to start, and on a first project we usually do not ask for it. A scheduled export, a CSV, or a reporting view your vendor already provides is enough. In practice that is the CSV or Excel file your RMS or CAD already exports, with the NIBRS offense code on each record; the build reads that file and does not connect to the records system itself.
Spreadsheets
The workbooks your analyst already maintains are often the fastest source of truth for a first build, because they encode counting rules that live nowhere else.
Your state NIBRS submission files
Useful for reconciling what you report against what you count locally.
We will not claim familiarity with a records system we have not worked in. What we do instead is read your export, ask about every ambiguous field, and write down what each one means, so the next person does not have to ask.
Discovery
We read your export, list the fields, and agree what the first dashboard has to answer. You get a written scope and a written quote before anything is signed.
Solution design
The data model gets built and the measures get defined once: what counts as a call, what counts as cleared, how a date range behaves. Definitions live in the model, not in each report page, which is why the numbers stop disagreeing.
Implementation
Report pages get built against your real data and reviewed with you as they go, not presented for the first time at the end.
Optimization and handoff
Two to four weeks of tuning after the first release, then you get the .pbix file, the documentation, and a working session with whoever will maintain it. The model is yours. If you never call us again, everything keeps running.
Security and the CJIS boundary
Your data stays in your environment
Reports are built and published in your agency’s own Microsoft tenant. Nothing is copied to a Blue Peak server and nothing goes to an outside service for processing.
Row level security
Command staff see everything, a squad supervisor sees their squad, an aggregated view carries no case detail at all. One model, governed access, and the rules documented so your IT staff can audit them.
The CJIS boundary is respected
We work one of two ways and you pick. Either your IT issues a guest account inside your own tenant, subject to whatever agreement, training and screening your CJIS terminal agency coordinator requires, or we work entirely from exports that you choose and control. If agency policy rules out an outside account, exports are enough. Where data can be aggregated or stripped of identifiers first, that is the version we would rather have.
How it is priced and how long it takes
A first crime statistics dashboard is delivered in three to eight weeks, quoted from a written scope.
The fee follows the scope. One calls for service dashboard against a single clean export is the smallest build. A command staff suite covering calls, incidents, arrests and shift workload, with the monthly report automated and row level security configured, is the largest. Tell us which one you need and we reply with a written quote.
Each phase is its own purchase. You buy the first dashboard, see it working, then decide whether there is a second one. No annual license from us, no hosting fee, no seat count. If you already have Power BI through Microsoft 365, there is usually nothing further to buy.
What your purchasing office gets
Each phase is its own written scope, its own acceptance and its own invoice. If your office needs a quote with a statement of work attached, a sole source justification, or a cooperative vehicle, say so and it is yours. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5.
Who does the work
Blue Peak’s senior team leads every build, and the consultant who scopes your dashboard is the one who builds it. Our lead consultant brings twelve years in production analytics, most of it in Power BI, SQL Server and the Microsoft stack.
That consultant led reporting on a $30M multi jurisdictional federal initiative from 2019 to 2022, integrating grantee data across jurisdictions and producing grant compliance reporting that passed federal funder review, and built an analytics product line used by more than 100 people at a national telecom, unifying a sales pipeline spanning six source systems into one Power BI environment.
That record was earned before Blue Peak, so we describe it as our people’s experience rather than the firm’s past performance, on purpose. What you get is the people who did that work, with no junior handoff.
See the build quality first
There is a working demo on this site: the interactive grant command center. It models grant reporting rather than police data and runs on synthetic data, so you can judge the build quality in a minute without anyone contacting you.
See the public safety demo, built on public Olathe Police Department data: crimes, traffic accidents and calls for service, real numbers you can check against the source.
For the analyst’s view, with a 60 second walkthrough: crime statistics dashboards in Power BI.
Send us your work email. We will build a one-page dashboard on your department’s public crime data.
We read your department off the address, pull its published FBI crime data and any city open data, and send back a one-page sample dashboard within 7 business days. No cost, no obligation, and nothing needed from your records system.
We build three a month. If this month is full, or your agency publishes nothing we can use, we write back within one business day and say so. Your email is used only to send the sample.
Questions agencies ask
What does a Power BI dashboard for a police department cost?
It is quoted from a written scope once we know what you need. One calls for service dashboard against a single clean export is the smallest build. A command staff suite covering calls, incidents, arrests and shift workload, with the monthly report automated and row level security configured, is the largest. There is no annual license fee from us and no seat count.
How long does it take?
Three to eight weeks for a first dashboard, from the day we have your export in hand. Discovery takes a few days. The data model and the first report pages take the bulk of the time. Handover, documentation and a working session close it out. The clock is usually set by how quickly your IT can produce a clean export, not by the build.
Do we have to run an RFP, or can this go under our purchasing threshold?
That is your purchasing code’s call, and you know it better than we do. What we do is make the purchase easy to fit: each phase is its own written scope, acceptance and invoice, and we will write a quote with a statement of work attached, or a sole source justification, in whatever form your office needs.
Is our data safe, and where does it live?
It stays in your environment. Reports are built and published in your agency’s own Microsoft tenant, never copied to a Blue Peak server and never sent to an outside service for processing. Row level security controls who sees what, and the access rules are documented so your IT staff can audit them. We work either on a guest account your IT issues inside your tenant, subject to whatever your CJIS terminal agency coordinator requires, or entirely from exports you choose and control.
Who owns the dashboard when the work is finished?
You do. Handover includes the .pbix file, the semantic model, the documented measures and a written description of every source field. Your analyst can open it, change it and republish it without us. There is no hosted product to keep paying for and no code held back. If you never call again, the reports keep refreshing on the schedule they were built with.
What if we do not have Power BI licenses?
Check before you buy anything. Power BI Desktop, where the model is built, is free. Publishing and sharing reports needs a per user license or a capacity, and many agencies already have that bundled in their Microsoft 365 plan without knowing it. Your IT can confirm it in the admin center in a couple of minutes. If it turns out you need licenses, you buy them from Microsoft directly. We do not resell them and take no margin on them.
Do you work outside Kansas?
Yes. Blue Peak is based in Olathe, Kansas, works across the Kansas City metro and Missouri, and delivers remotely beyond both. The build happens inside your tenant, so distance changes nothing about the work. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5, and will complete whatever vendor registration your state or agency requires before an award.
What does our analyst have to do?
Less than you expect, and it front loads. Roughly a few hours in discovery walking us through the export and the counting rules, then a review session on each report page as it is built, then a handover session. We do not need your analyst to prepare the data, clean it or build anything. The one thing only they can answer is what the fields actually mean in your agency, and that is the part we ask about most.
Send one line: the report you hate producing
Email sergei@bluepeakdataconsulting.com and name the recurring report that costs you the most time. The monthly command staff packet, the quarterly UCR reconciliation, the beat workload question that returns every schedule change. One line is enough, plus a rough figure for how long it takes today.
You get an honest read back within one business day: what it would take, roughly what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all. If your own analyst could build it in an afternoon, we will say so.