[EPIC] VA Police Transparency MVP

[mmiddaugh]

Value to Veterans

Veterans will have access to facility-level police activity, such as arrests, tickets, use of force, internal investigations, complaints, and disciplinary actions. Direct contact information for the police force will also be be made available so that employees and the public can request more information about VA police activity.

Headlines

Business stakeholder -VHA and VA Police Services
OCTO owner - Michelle Middaugh

Problem to solve

Legislation passed in 2022 requires VAMC websites to include data about VA police activity.
Deadline: One year after the enactment (December 29, 2022), the Secretary shall report to Congress on the implementation of all provisions of amendments to 38 USC 902, which includes the publishing of arrest and ticketing data.

Initiative Brief: VA police transparency (WIP)

Background

Cleland Dole Act Sec 405 legislation passed in 2022

“(e) (1) The Secretary shall publish on the internet website of each facility of the Department the following information with respect to the facility:
“(A) Summaries and statistics covering the previous five-year period regarding—
“(i) arrests made by and tickets issued by Department police officers;
“(ii) prosecutions, ticketing, and other actions relating to such arrests;
“(iii) the use of force and weapons discharge by Department police officers; and
“(iv) complaints, investigations, and disciplinary actions regarding Department police officers.
“(B) Contact information for employees of the Department and the public to directly contact the police force of the facility, including for an individual (or the representative, attorney, or authorized agent of the individual) to request information regarding the arrest, ticketing, detainment, use of force, or other police matters pertaining to that individual.
“(2) The Secretary shall ensure that each police force of a facility of the Department is able to provide to an individual who contacts the police force pursuant to paragraph (1)(B) the information described in such paragraph.”.

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Information on data source (from Jeffrey Steidler, 7/26)

• The current system is Report Exec, from Omnigo Inc which will be replaced by a newly procured system to be implemented ~October 1, 2023. The new system will have advanced capabilities to track and trend data, with easy data exporting in a Power BI Dashboard format. VA will have the ability to analyze data in a ways we previously could not, including improved demographic data collection, and location mapping. It includes automatic exporting of required data points to the FBI (National Incident Based Reporting) which is legislatively mandated and will allow us to publish data in compliance with the Cleland Dole Act.
• Existing data will need to be scrubbed for quality so we should not expect to have access to historical data. 5 year data request can be fulfilled going forward.
• Phase 1 - Oct 1, 2023 - March 30, 2024 - VA police use new system as reporting tool of record and data from legacy system is scrubbed and migrated
• Phase 2 - begins April 1, 2024 - API to be available

Meeting with vendor for questions and insight into data export options to be scheduled.

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Web presence on VA.gov Departments: VA police

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Results of quick audit to find existing VA police-related content

The following systems have VA Police detail pages (all program pages) - VA Palo Alto health care - VA Northern California health care (also linked from Sacramento VAMC's Prepare for your visit “Security” accordion) - VA Greater Los Angeles health care - VA Oklahoma City health care - VA Salt Lake City health care

A few others have added info about the VA Police to the Prepare for your visit sections, such as

• Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans' Hospital (“Security” accordion)
• Clement J. Zablocki Veterans' Administration Medical Center (“Security” heading within the “Parking” accordion)
• Omaha VA Medical Center (within the “Visitor information” accordion)
• VA Montana Health Care (“Security” accordion)
• VA Cheyenne health care’s Northern Colorado VA Clinic (“Police Services” is literally the only accordion in the Prepare for your visit section)

Note: none of the pages above contain the required data but suggest where data might be added

Considerations

• Facility level page
• System level roll-out with facility breakdown
• Top Task pages (Register for Care/Medical Record/ Billing and Insurance) are system level pages that can show roll ups of facility-specific information might be a good pattern to look

Tasks / Milestones

TBD based on learning more about source of data and how the data can be made available

DRAFT TIMELINE: Sharepoint (shared with Sitewide Facilities team)

Code freeze: 12/22 - 1/2

• Collab Cycle: required? Probably, if API. If so: milestones likely include
  • Design Intent
  • Midpoint
  • Content team intake
    • Content (copy) - Will need to engage Content team for input for plain language. This could be the biggest timeline risk, TBD their priorities / availability.
    • IA - if data is not on existing VAMC facility pages, will need IA input for URL?
  • Staging Review
  • Contact center - tbd, if they consider this a Product
  • Security review
• Content strategy - any data being ingested / supplemented by CMS? Or direct passthrough to API > FE? Will determine if we need a content spec.
• Design - where does content appear (existing VAMC facility pages, or a link on VAMCs to data elsewhere, etc), how much content is displayed
• Research - can we ship an MVP and research / iterate it retroactively, to hit the deadline?
• BE - if no Drupal, and just getting vendor data available through Ruby work in vets-api
  • Data must be stored somewhere, if not in CMS, figure out datastore (S3)
    • Can be manual push to datastore for MVP / automate later
  • Plan API architecture / endpoints
  • Document API (in swagger?)
  • Coordinate with vets-api around hooking up data (Check with Daniel / Josh re: how this actually worked)
• Drupal? - currently don't think so.
• FE
  • Frame out presentation in template(s)
  • Connect presentation to API data
• Launch

Resources

• Example use of force data reported monthly to the FBI:
  Report_UOF_2023_07_ASHRAOSP.docx
• Collab cycle IA design
• CAIA centralized content feedback

[mmiddaugh]

Capturing some quick industry examples...

Cleveland Clinic Police and Security site

Screenshot from https://www.policedatainitiative.org/

Private Zenhub Image

Screenshot from https://bpd-data.bellevuewa.gov/pages/use-of-force/

Private Zenhub Image

Screenshot from https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/government-data/datasource/crime-dashboard/

Private Zenhub Image

Screenshot from https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/data/arrest-dashboard

Private Zenhub Image

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Other things to consider

• What data is most salient/meets legal obligation?
• How to provide definitions/explanatory context - in page or via link? (to where?)
  • i.e., Portland Police open data
  • i.e., Crime type definitions - Metropolitan Police (UK)
• Does it need to be filterable by Veterans and beneficiaries?
• Inclusion of "as of" date
• Presenting data in mobile

[xiongjaneg]

Storage https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/tree/master/products/facilities/medical-centers/police

[jilladams]

@mmiddaugh @xiongjaneg penciled in milestones / buckets of work, all TBD on what we figure out re: the data / how we can access it and if we'll need to store it. Discovery tickets and responses from Michelle's reachouts will help clarify some of that, and we can gut check it all with team -- added to 16th minute for Tues as a starting point and Product sync agenda.

[xiongjaneg]

Platform Collaboration Cycle kickoff request

[mmiddaugh]

Related: Executive Order on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety

[jilladams]

Noting from planning for my own future self: FE tickets for build based on SPIKE findings in #15446 will get cut in the next FE refinement.

[mmiddaugh]

Digital Experience Board: Make VA Police data visible on VAMC pages #859

[jilladams]

Notes from sprint 99 planning, with @xiongjaneg @mmiddaugh @eselkin @maxx1128 @davidmpickett @swirtSJW @omahane

With MVP scope decisions in light of our timeline:

Staging Review timing / a11y testing & data

• Staging Review 12/14 requires providing foundational testing artifacts 4 business days prior, meaning: by EOD Fri 12/8. THat's not possible given the current state of the FE:
  • No data from Axon yet. Call with them scheduled for tomorrow.
  • Build is not close enough to completion to turn it around in 1 business day from that call, in order to hit the deadline.
• We have options:
  • Reduce scope to only existing patterns, that would not require Staging Review. Plan of record, as of today.
  • Keep 12/14 Staging Review and scope down to a different MVP scope we could achieve by end of this week, to do that.
  • Try to do 12/21 Staging Review. This means: shipping on the day before code freeze, which is its own risk.

MVP scope

🔴 Option: present national Use of force data only

• already presented to the FBI monthly and has existing standards.
• We do not yet have those CSVs, but they come from VA Security, not from Axon. So we could, at minimum, likely get November's data. @mmiddaugh to follow up on that today.
• This is not as useful to Veterans. Includes Use of Force and Weapons Discharge data, with no context. This is not a Veteran win.

🟢 Option: Contact information

• Michelle's inclination: without Contact Info, we don't ship.
• Data comes from (? Axon? Or Police?).
  • If Axon: No certainty we'll get the data, be able to process it, present it by the deadline (12.5 working days from now).
  • If we can get the Contact info CSV, we can import it to Drupal via CSV migration. (Could generate the pages before we can get data migrated.)
    • We originally intended to put this through KISS into the React widget, so this would be a change. Simplifies the FE, though, by not requiring
    • If we put it into Drupal, we could in the future make this a field that is open to Editors. Michelle likes this, since we've discussed the option of allowing Editors to list additional phone numbers.
• This much would also not require Staging Review, because VAMC pages with contact information is an existing pattern.
• DECISION: Contact info, Drupal migration, locked field for now.

🟢 Option: FAQs:

• Per Michelle, FAQs alone do not satisfy the legislation. This is included to serve Veterans, not to meet the congressional mandate. This is a good faith demonstration.
• Built in the CMS, and could be populated today.
• Could potentially ship this without full staging review, as it's a content component of VAMCs, without a live data source.

Design

No design updates needed right now, since we are just removing some previously-treated elements for now.

Open questions/next steps

• Product needs to determine which pieces of Centralized Content should show.
• Axon or Security need to provide the contact information
  • Need to update the VA Police content model once we confirm the source of that data is/isn't Axon

FYI @xiongjaneg , notes from today, in case any are useful for the decision log.

[mmiddaugh]

Status update

Meeting with Axon 2/12/2024

• data confidence is at system and VISN level
  • facilities have been handled differently by health care systems - not all have been included/identified
  • not all reports identify facility level location
• Labor intensive/ manual process to make data meaningful based on formatting issues with search export
• Axon will prefer data as dashboard in future

Pending

• Business decision from VHA Law Enforcement as to whether system level data satisfies reporting requirement
  • should we expect facility level data to be available for all facilities in the future?
• Professional standards data (complaints, investigations, and disciplinary actions)
• Definitions for unexpected data elements: Criminal reports, Responses to resistance, Internal complaints
• List of systems with API IDs and names to confirm alignment between Facilities team and Axon team
• Confirmation of support for Drupal CMS as the single source for public-facing system/facility level police contact information (phone numbers), entered by PAOs/local staff
  • date of deprecation/expectation of future export prior
  • will an export of our data? be needed?
• How/Who will access data/dashboard - there may be licensing issues and/or FedRamp implications
• Confirmation of preference for FBI reported national data for use of force and weapons discharge and automated method for receiving data

[mmiddaugh]

List of healthcare systems from Axon (for reporting at system level, if approved)

• Each healthcare system has a location table with defined facilities and sublocations w/in those facilities.
• Facility list will change imminently and is a bit more difficult to get.
• If we decide that the healthcare system level is the lowest level that we want to report data, then the spreadsheet should help.