San Francisco Police Department enhances public safety with OCI

As the only city-county in the state, San Francisco is unique in California. The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is part of several public safety entities, including the sheriff’s department, fire department, and emergency management. All are tasked with maintaining countywide public safety for a population of more than 800,000 residents.

SFPD had a vision to use technology to support several new initiatives that would meet the community’s current needs. However, the department’s legacy on-premises systems put a heavy burden on the relatively small team trying to maintain them. Some of those core systems included Oracle PeopleSoft—which handled back-office functions such as police officer scheduling, time management, human resources, and finance—Oracle Business Intelligence applications, several other third-party analytics tools, and Oracle databases. The whole environment ran on aging servers that made upgrading, scaling, and supporting the applications increasingly time-consuming and expensive.

The technological pitfalls also impacted daily operations. Outages and performance issues delayed processes, and manual paper-based workflows caused frustration for employees and residents. The department’s relationship with the public is vital, but the lacking analytics capabilities and various data sources made it difficult to gather and quickly report information to residents. SFPD knew a change was needed to help build trust with the public, enhance critical systems, and improve the lives of everyone in the city and county.

SFPD recognized that continuing to support its on-premises environment was not feasible and began searching for an alternative. The department ultimately decided to move its critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to simplify IT operations, enhance efficiency, and make better use of its data.

The move to the cloud would ease the strain on the small IT team, which struggled to keep aging servers and unsupported applications running. It would also reduce the high costs associated with those systems, saving money that could be reallocated to other county initiatives. Also, business users would benefit from the higher performance and availability of OCI, allowing for more streamlined processes and reducing concerns of outages. 

In addition, the cloud would make it easier to store, manage, and analyze data. Combining the SFPD’s existing Oracle Business Intelligence applications with OCI’s cloud native Oracle Analytics platform would decrease the need for other third-party tools, accelerate reporting to the public, and provide AI capabilities that could promote better policing.

SFPD and its other public safety entities made great strides moving core systems to OCI. Migrating Oracle PeopleSoft and its back-end databases to the cloud eliminated the struggle of maintaining on-premises servers and future-proofed the organization to meet current demands. 

IT operations became simpler with Oracle maintaining the infrastructure, while business teams across HR and finance saw faster performance with PeopleSoft running on OCI. With data stored securely in the cloud, accessing and sharing information became easier and lessened reliance on spreadsheets, manual work, and paper-based processes. 

Similarly, bringing its existing Oracle Business Intelligence tools to the cloud helped the department to take advantage of its highly available data. The improved performance of those applications in tandem with the advanced AI and analytics capabilities of Oracle Analytics brought a new level of sophistication to SFPD’s data management, enriching data quality and actionable intelligence. It also allowed the department to eliminate the cost of using third-party business intelligence tools.

The department used its newfound analytics capabilities to provide data to the public much more quickly. The on-premises environment delayed reporting, so people desperate for details on last night’s incident could wait days or weeks to hear updates. With Oracle Cloud, SFPD streamlined data to residents in near real time, providing greater transparency and building trust between law enforcement and the public—a monumental win.

Although still early in its renewed analytics journey, SFPD plans to use the AI potential of Oracle Analytics to help improve policing. It will go beyond the standard bias training mandated by the state, create new fields for officers to input data about each incident, and capture more nuanced details to tell a full story. That data can then be analyzed with AI to build better practices regarding biases, early intervention, and use of force, ultimately helping officers do their jobs better. Moreover, SFPD will be able to analyze other large narrative text and written documents and use automated data science to help solve crime.