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PatrolDesk is built on your data

Sit down.
Know what to do.

There are only two ways to get more policing out of the people you have: put them in the right places, and have them working at the right hours. PatrolDesk measures both from the data you already publish — built on Pittsburgh’s six zones — and opens on the one screen a watch commander needs first.

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Watch the five-minute briefing for chiefs5:21

NO INTEGRATION TO START · RUNS ON PUBLISHED OPEN DATA · NOTHING TOUCHES YOUR SYSTEMS

PatrolDesk opening on Tonight for Zone 5, violent crime: what changed, the next step, what always happens, and whether the roster matches
70,140
Pittsburgh incidents, 32 months, every one traceable from any figure
8
cities running today on the same method — Pittsburgh first
$0
to integrate. It starts on what your department already publishes
0
profiles of individuals. It measures places and hours, never people
Watch it work

Start with the briefing. Then one idea at a time.

The briefing is five minutes for a chief who has never seen PatrolDesk. The eight short videos after it show one idea each. Every one is PatrolDesk running on published data. No mockups, no actors.

5:21
START HERE · A BRIEFING FOR CHIEFS

Built for the officers you have.

You can’t hire your way out in one budget year. Five minutes on the four questions a chief asks before spending money, answered on real screens.

  1. 1:00How does it serve the mission?
  2. 1:55Where is the return on the subscription?
  3. 3:08Where will I see it on the street?
  4. 3:59Is there anything else like it?
Three short videos
1:46 01 · IT STARTS ON WHAT YOU PUBLISH

Sit down. Know what to do.

Zone 5 tonight: what changed against its own history, the block in 3D, and a watch order priced in officer-hours. Nothing connected to do it.

1:25 02 · PLACES AND HOURS

The right places. The right hours.

Demand against the roster, hour by hour. Type in your real watches and the finding recomputes, down to the sector.

1:30 03 · IT GRADES ITSELF

It went up. Say so.

An order recorded before it starts and graded when the month lands, displacement ring included. Including the month it went the wrong way.

The feature series
1:33 04 · SEARCH · ASK · COMPARE

The Question in the Room

A corner, a plain question, this summer against last — answered while they’re still in the room, with the reports behind every number.

1:23 05 · THE DAILY BRIEF

The Page at Roll Call

One page per zone, per watch: what changed this week, and the blocks to pass before a repeat break-in window closes.

1:26 06 · PLACE HISTORY · CAMERAS

Before You Go

Weapons, assaults, robberies and homicides on record near every place on the watch order, with camera coverage beside them.

1:26 07 · EVENTS AND VENUES

Game Day

What a home game actually does to the blocks around the ballpark, how far it reaches, and the arena where it does nothing measurable.

1:28 08 · CLEARANCE BY ARREST

Patrol or Detectives?

Where crime is rising and rarely solved, by offense, zone and sector, so the next hour goes where it can work.

Videos play from YouTube in privacy-enhanced mode, and only after you press play. The PatrolDesk channel →

The constraint

Most departments are short. Hiring takes years. The schedule is the only lever that costs nothing.

“Data said from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. we had 8% of our call volume, yet we had 33% of our personnel working.” A POLICE CHIEF, JUSTIFYING A BUREAU-WIDE SHIFT CHANGE. COMPUTED ONCE, BY HAND. NOBODY CHECKED IT AGAIN.
THE RIGHT PLACES

Five percent of the places hold a third of the crime. PatrolDesk finds the places that changed — scored against their own history, not a city average — and turns them into a watch order a sergeant can read at roll call.

THE RIGHT HOURS

Demand against staffing, hour by hour, per zone, per sector. The finding that reorganized a bureau in one sentence is now a screen that recomputes every month instead of once every two years.

AND WHETHER IT WORKED

Every course of action is pre-registered — the expected effect written down before deployment — and graded by the ledger when the next data lands, displacement ring included. A measurement, not a story told afterwards.

Seven words, no menus

What changed. Where. When. Who’s on. What to do. Whether it worked.

PatrolDesk is organized around the things a person came to do, in the order they do them. Each is one word on the left edge of the screen, and every screen is one click under one of them.

TONIGHT · WHERE · WHEN

What’s there, what changed

Start on the brief for your area. Then the map: every record, where volume piles up, what changed against its own history, what never changes. Then the week, hour by hour. Type a corner or ask a question from any of them.

  • TONIGHT
  • POINTS
  • DENSITY
  • EMERGING
  • CHRONIC
  • SEARCH & ASK
STAFFING · ORDERS

What to do about it

Demand against your roster, by hour. Two or three costed courses of action that differ in officer-hours and in how soon you could prove they worked. A printable watch order, with every place one click from a 3D look at the block.

  • COVERAGE
  • COURSES OF ACTION
  • WATCH ORDER
  • LOOK AT THE BLOCK
  • DAILY BRIEF
LEDGER · MORE

Whether it worked

Recorded orders graded against what actually followed, ring included. And the rest: cleared by arrest, what a ballgame does to the blocks around it, two areas or two summers side by side, the live layer, CSV export.

  • LEDGER
  • CLEARANCE
  • EVENTS
  • COMPARE
  • LIVE
  • EXPORT
Tonight

Sit down. Pick your zone. Know what to do.

The start screen reads top to bottom the way a watch commander thinks: what changed in the area you run, the next step, what always happens, and whether the roster matches the work. Every line is computed from the published records by the same functions the other screens use. Nothing on it is written by hand.

“Bloomfield · Friendship Avenue — 8 in 28 days, expected 1.3, vandalism. +5.9σ. 99 other cells are busy but not changing — they are under CHRONIC, not here.” ZONE 5, DATA THROUGH AUGUST 31, 2026. TWO FRIENDSHIP AVENUE CELLS AT THE TOP OF THE LIST ARE THE STORY OF THE MONTH — AND THE TOOL SAYS SO WITHOUT BEING ASKED.
The Tonight start screen for Zone 5: what changed, the next step, what always happens, and whether the roster matches
Seven words

Every screen, one click from the left edge.

TONIGHT, WHERE, WHEN, STAFFING, ORDERS, LEDGER, MORE. No tabs inside tabs, no menu to learn. The header keeps the filters, the search box and the actions; the rail keeps the questions. On a phone the rail folds into a tab bar and the map fills the screen.

A first visit asks one thing — what do you need to do? — and opens the right screen. A three-minute tour drives the real screens with real numbers, in the order a chief would ask for them.

The first-run choice: run tonight's watch, review an area, check an order, or take the tour
Look at the block

The place, in 3D — with the records on the buildings.

One button on any finding or watch-order place opens the block in Google Photorealistic 3D. It is not a pretty map: every report in the window is drawn where it happened, colored by category, the last 28 days ringed in white; the cell the finding names is outlined; the spots that carry the records are circled and counted. Hover any mark and it says what it is — the offense, the day and hour, whether it was cleared, how far from the center. Click one and the camera goes there.

“5 reports within 40 m · 2 in the last 28 days. 247 m E, outside the cell. Most often around 11:00. 25 here since 2024-01-01.” A SPOT'S TOOLTIP. THE PANEL BESIDE IT CARRIES THE FINDING, WHERE TO STAND, THE BUSIEST HOURS, THE OFFICER-SAFETY LINE AND THE CAMERA LINE.
Look at the block: photoreal 3D of a Bloomfield cell with every record drawn on the buildings, the cell outlined, spots counted, and a tooltip open on one spot
Where

Where crime changed — not where it is.

Every 150-meter cell is scored against its own previous 84 days, seasonally corrected. A permanently busy corner does not light up; a quiet one that just turned does. Click any place and it explains itself in plain language: which offenses, what hours, how tightly grouped, when the run started — with the records listed underneath.

An emerging cluster drill-down showing the reasoning behind the finding, offense and day-of-week breakdowns and the records themselves
When

Pattern or spike. Your resource decision, every day.

Day of week by hour of day, for whatever is on screen, given the whole width of its own screen. Click a square and it tells you how many of that weekday actually carried incidents. Thirteen of thirteen Mondays is a standing problem worth a standing response. Thirty-four records on one night is an event that is already over.

The When screen: the map above, the day-of-week by hour-of-day matrix below, with the busiest window named
Search & ask

“Penn and Highland.” It goes there.

Type a corner, a block or a street from the Tonight screen or the header and the map goes there with the records behind it — from the city's own street centerline, not a geocoder. Ask a question in plain words — burglaries in zone 5 last 28 days — and the answer is a computed sentence with the filters set to match. Six cities have address search; every city has the questions. No language model anywhere.

PatrolDesk after typing 'Penn and Highland': the corner marked on the map and the records within 75 meters listed, with what is typical for the window
Staffing

Are your people on when the work is?

Demand by hour against the roster by hour, as shares, so it never needs real headcounts to say a third of the roster is covering an eighth of the work. The three-watch model is a placeholder: edit it live and the finding recomputes.

“35% of the work falls between 08:00 and 14:00, when 20% of the roster is on. Between 02:00 and 08:00 it inverts: 27% of the roster covers 11% of the work.” ZONE 5, DEFAULT WATCH MODEL. THE FREDERICK-ERA 3 A.M.–7 A.M. FINDING, RECOMPUTED PER ZONE AND PER SECTOR EVERY MONTH.
Staffing: demand bars by hour against an officers-on-duty line, with the editable watch model and the worst hour per sector
Orders

Two or three options. Costed. Honest about what can be proven.

HOLD, CONCENTRATE, SATURATE — places, surge window, the dose, the effect range from 65+ published trials attributed, and the line nobody else prints: how long until a reduction that size is measurable, pooled across the set. Places whose dominant record is fraud or the vehicle code are left off, and the card says how many.

Courses of action for Zone 5 — HOLD, CONCENTRATE and SATURATE — each with cost in officer-hours, places, surge window and weeks to measure
The watch order

One page a sergeant reads at roll call.

When, dose, cost, the numbered places with sector and evidence, Before you go — weapons, aggravated assault, robbery and homicide on record at each place, and whether a camera covers it — The places, seen in satellite and street frames, what to expect, and the review terms. Every place has a LOOK AT THE BLOCK button. One more button records the order, so the review is a measurement and not a story told afterward.

A printed watch order: when, dose, cost, six numbered places with sector, pattern, evidence and 3D buttons, the Before You Go table, and the places seen
The ledger

An order is a claim only if it was written down first.

A recorded order freezes its places and their baselines the day it is written. When the next month's data lands, it is graded against the places' own history — with the surrounding ring, so displacement is a number — and the verdict is plain: down and inside the cited range, no measurable change, or it went up, say so. Backtests show what places do on their own, which is the control every real order is compared against.

“SATURATE as of July 31, graded against August. +43% (80 vs 55.9, z 3.2). It went up. Say so. Adjacent ring +28% — possible displacement.” NO DEPLOYMENT HAPPENED. THE TOOL TELLING ON ITSELF, ON THE MONTH THAT JUST ARRIVED.
The ledger: recorded orders waiting for the next data release, backtests graded against what actually followed, and the camera list loader
Compare

“Is this summer worse than last summer?” One screen.

Two areas side by side, or one area against the same dates a year earlier. Records, typical, category split, concentration, busiest hour and day, clearance, top types, and the percentages. Counts, not rates; a year apart removes the season.

“Zone 5 violent, 3 June – 31 August 2026 against the same dates in 2025: 248 vs 222, +12%.” THE QUESTION EVERY CHIEF IS ASKED IN PUBLIC, WITH THE ARITHMETIC.
Compare: Zone 5 violent crime, the last 90 days against the same dates a year earlier — records, typical, clearance and top types side by side
The daily brief

Dashboards don’t get used. Briefs get read.

One page per area, per watch: since the last brief, what changed, the watch list, the hours, and the records behind every line. Printed from the Tonight screen in one click.

The daily brief for Zone 5, 06:00–14:00 watch: since the last brief, what changed, the watch list with near-repeat windows, the standing pattern
On a phone

The same tool, one hand.

The rail folds into a tab bar, the map fills the screen, and the findings live in a sheet you drag between three heights. Tonight is a single column. Nothing is a separate app; a share link opens the same screen on a phone as on a desk.

The Tonight screen on a phone: zone and category chips, what changed, and the tab bar
Why trust it

It says no.

This category has burned its buyers. PatrolDesk is built on the opposite premise: a tool that admits a null result is a tool whose positive results can be believed.

NEAR-REPEAT

It reports a weak signal as weak.

After a property crime, the odds of another within 200 m in 72 hours run about 1.19× in Pittsburgh. Real, modest — and labeled no strong signal rather than dressed up.

Violent: 1.03× — essentially nothing, exactly as the literature reports. The tool says so.
NO PROBABILITIES

It never prints a chance of success.

A course of action quotes what interventions of that kind have produced across 65+ published trials, attributed — never a promise for a particular street.

“Interventions of this kind have produced 11–25% reductions at treated places. That is not a promise for these streets.”
INCONCLUSIVE IS AN OUTCOME

It tells you what can’t be measured — before you deploy.

At a single hot spot, a 16% reduction is invisible for months. PatrolDesk computes that up front and says whether you will be able to tell.

Simple assault at a ballgame: 2.6×, p 0.082 — “not separable from noise.” A number a less careful tool prints as a result.
TRACEABLE

Every figure opens to the records behind it.

Clusters, matrix cells, brief findings — click any of them and the records are listed. Every screen has a share link that opens exactly that view for whoever receives it. When crime statistics are argued about in public, that is not a technical nicety. It is cover.

Data validated by 13 named rules that caught real defects — one-row-per-charge feeds, four-hour timezone errors, privacy-masked stacks — before they shipped.
Who it’s for

Built for the department with 40 officers and the one with 900.

SMALL & MID-SIZE DEPARTMENTS

You have the data. You’ve never had the analyst.

Most agencies under 100 sworn have no crime analyst and no budget for one. PatrolDesk does the analyst’s first week of work in the time it takes to load — on the data you already publish, with no integration and no IT project.

  • Starts on your open-data feed the same day. No CAD access needed to begin.
  • The daily brief replaces the morning spreadsheet.
  • Priced under most municipal bid thresholds — a single grant line item.
  • One screen a chief can put in front of council with every number traceable.
LARGE DEPARTMENTS

Your CAD analytics tell you what happened. This tells you what to do.

Records systems count. PatrolDesk decides — where to surge, on which nights, at what cost in officer-hours, and how long until you can prove it worked. It runs per zone and per sector, so a watch commander sees only the ground they own.

  • Coverage per sector — the staffing-versus-demand finding at the unit a commander can actually move people between.
  • Courses of action pre-registered before deployment and graded by the ledger afterward, for an accountability cycle that survives scrutiny.
  • Clearance by arrest per place, so detectives and patrol get different answers.
  • CAD-ready. The ingestion framework validates any feed against the same 13 rules.
Data

It starts on what you already publish.

Eight cities run today on their open-data portals — Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN — with no access to any internal system. That is deliberate: staying on public data is what lets a department start in a day, and what keeps the product outside the CJIS wall until you choose to connect a feed.

Every dataset passes a validation framework before it reaches a screen. Each rule exists because a real feed failed it.

TIMEZONE_TROUGHQuiet hours must fall 03:00–07:00 local. Caught a feed shipped four hours off.
DUPLICATE_GRAINDetects one-row-per-charge feeds — a single arrest published as 30 records — and tells masking from duplication.
ZONE_AGREEMENTEvery record checked against its boundary polygon. Found a missing downtown sector at 36% miss rate.
CATEGORY_DOMINANCEFlags a single offense code above 15% — traffic and parking dominating a “crime” hot spot.
+ 9 moreCoordinate containment, temporal gaps, volume steps, geocode rate, date sanity, vocabulary match, precision, time-of-day, boundary coverage.
Pricing

Priced to be bought, not to be bid.

Annual, per department, unlimited seats. No hardware, no per-officer licensing, no data fees.

UNDER 100 SWORN
Small department
From $9,000
PER YEAR · TYPICALLY $9,000–15,000
  • Every screen, one jurisdiction
  • Monthly refresh from your open-data feed
  • Daily brief and watch orders
  • Email support
Talk to us
100 – 500 SWORN
Mid-size department
From $18,000
PER YEAR · TYPICALLY $18,000–36,000 · UNDER MOST BID THRESHOLDS
  • Everything in Small
  • Sectors and per-sector coverage
  • Events and venue catchments
  • Live layer where your radio is public
  • Priority support
Request a demo
500 – 2,000 SWORN
Large department
From $45,000
PER YEAR · TYPICALLY $45,000–90,000, OR ABOUT $0.25 PER RESIDENT
  • Everything in Mid-size
  • Multi-zone accountability cycle
  • Custom offense mapping and rules
  • Onboarding for analysts and commanders
Talk to us
CAD / RMS CONNECTED
Enterprise
From $150,000
PER YEAR · CJIS-COMPLIANT DEPLOYMENT, QUOTED
  • Read-only CAD/RMS feed
  • Calls for service as the demand curve
  • Exact addresses, live
  • Separate compliance scope and agreement
Start the conversation

Every price is a starting point for a department of that size; the figure in your agreement depends on jurisdiction size and what is in scope. Pilot agreements are priced below list on purpose — one zone, ninety days, a 90-day out, and a first-year figure that sits under a single Byrne JAG sub-award and most municipal bid thresholds. The pilot price is a pilot price: the agreement states the list price it discounts from. If the emerging list tells your commanders nothing they didn’t already know, you’ve lost nothing. For comparison, a crime analyst’s median salary is about $79,000 before benefits.

Questions

Asked by every chief,
answered the same way every time.

What is PatrolDesk?

PatrolDesk is deployment-intelligence software for police departments. It reads the incident data a department already publishes and answers three questions: where crime is changing, whether officers are on duty when and where the work is, and which course of action can be proven to have worked.

What data does PatrolDesk use?

The incident records a department already publishes to its open-data portal (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN or a CSV export), plus public feeds like the National Weather Service. Every dataset passes a 13-rule validation before it reaches a screen. A read-only CAD or RMS feed can be added later for live, exact-address data.

Does PatrolDesk need to integrate with our CAD or RMS?

No. It starts on published data with no integration and no IT project, usually the same day. Connecting a CAD or RMS feed is optional and is a configuration, not a rebuild.

Does PatrolDesk predict crime or identify individuals?

No. PatrolDesk measures where crime has been concentrating, when, and whether staffing matches it — places and hours, never people. It never prints a probability of success; each course of action quotes the published research on what interventions of that kind have produced, and states up front whether the result will be measurable.

How much does PatrolDesk cost?

Annual, per department, unlimited seats, no hardware and no per-officer licensing. Small departments under 100 sworn start at $9,000 a year. Mid-size, 100–500 sworn, from $18,000. Large, 500–2,000 sworn, from $45,000, or about $0.25 per resident. CAD-connected, CJIS-compliant deployments from $150,000, quoted. Ninety-day single-zone pilots are priced below list, and the agreement states the list price they discount from.

Which departments is PatrolDesk built for?

Both the 40-officer department with no crime analyst and the 900-officer department whose CAD analytics only say what happened. It runs per zone and per sector, so a watch commander sees only the ground they own.

How is PatrolDesk different from a crime dashboard?

A dashboard shows counts. PatrolDesk scores each place against its own history, computes staffing against demand by hour, prices two or three deployments in officer-hours, and writes the expected effect down before the deployment so the result is a measurement rather than a story.

Can it find an address?

Yes. Type a block, a corner or a street — "1200 block of Penn," "Carson and 18th," "Forbes Avenue" — and PatrolDesk goes there with the records behind it, using the city's own street centerline. Add an offense and a time ("assaults near Penn and Negley on weekends") and the answer is computed for that place.

How do we know whether a deployment worked?

Every watch order can be recorded to a ledger before it starts, with each place's own baseline. When the next data release arrives, PatrolDesk grades the order: the change at the places against their own history, and the same test on the 400-meter ring around them so displacement is a number rather than a worry. A backtest shows what a graded order looks like before any real one has matured.

Is our data safe with this?

Today the product only reads data your department has already published, runs entirely in the browser, and keeps nothing of yours on our side; the ledger, your watch model and any camera list you load stay in your browser. When a department connects a feed that is not public, a login gateway — single sign-on through your identity provider, multi-factor authentication, role-based access, an audit log — goes in front of it first. CAD and RMS connections follow the FBI CJIS Security Policy and are contracted separately. The security page says all of it in plain language.

How do we start?

Send your department's name through the contact form at patroldesk.app/contact.html. If your incident data is published, we can show PatrolDesk running on it before the first call ends.

Try it on one zone

See your own city in it.

If your department publishes incident data, we can show you PatrolDesk running on it before the first call ends. Send your department's name through the contact form.

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