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The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department’s (SSD) innovative Technical Operations and Homeless Outreach Team deployed a custom cloud-based app and analytics. The application not only improves the quality of information for SSD services but also makes detailed homeless data available across 88 regional agencies for smarter services and policy-making.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Technical Operations team had already deployed hundreds of mobile devices as part of an ongoing strategy to transition to paperless reporting and enable mobile collaboration in the field. Yet the Homeless field reporting was still largely manual, time-consuming and in need of digital transformation with new mobile-enabled procedures.
The legacy system relied on paper forms, data entry, desktop software and daily manual reports that were time-consuming. The Homeless Outreach Team mobile application now provides cloud-based collaboration and field data collection that is more efficient, provides continuously improving data-driven knowledge and enables data analytics to identify solutions to problems, both near-term and long-term.
Using the TerraGo Magic platform, the Homeless Outreach Team, in partnership with Sacramento State University, developed efficient mobile questionnaires (smart forms) that would be used to gather field data to support not only tactical services but also enable studies for better policies in the long term. The Homeless Outreach Team specified the mobile app logo, colors and features which were published to app store using TerraGo Magic.
SSD deputies and partner agencies like Park Rangers are able to gather information on homeless individuals, along with their location. All the data regarding the homeless is updated to the SSD databases as well as the regional records system.
Different agencies can then access the data that illuminates issues that drive actions and smarter polices. (primary and secondary reasons for homelessness, duration of homelessness, presence of mental health issues, addiction to drugs or alcohol, treatment programs, education level, source of income, willingness to accept assistance, reasons for rejecting assistance and more).
Using the TerraGo Magic platform, the Homeless Outreach Team, in partnership with Sacramento State University, developed efficient mobile questionnaires (smart forms) that would be used to gather field data to support not only tactical services but also enable studies for better policies in the long term. The Homeless Outreach Team specified the mobile app logo, colors and features which were published to app store using TerraGo Magic.
SSD deputies and partner agencies like Park Rangers are able to gather information on homeless individuals, along with their location. All the data regarding the homeless is updated to the SSD databases as well as the regional records system.
Different agencies can then access the data that illuminates issues that drive actions and smarter polices. (primary and secondary reasons for homelessness, duration of homelessness, presence of mental health issues, addiction to drugs or alcohol, treatment programs, education level, source of income, willingness to accept assistance, reasons for rejecting assistance and more).
Based on the positive impact to the community, the Sacramento County Sheriff and TerraGo Technologies were presented with a Smart 50 Award as one of the nation’s best applications of smart city technology.