![]() ![]() The program takes behavior identified in First Sign to create officer-specific interventions and provides best practices that have been proven to be most effective. The result of all this work was the creation of a proactive, targeted support program called CARE, short for Case Action Response Engine®. “Ultimately, we want to understand why different officers behave differently and whether and how agencies can intervene to get wayward officers back on track.” This will allow researchers to make connections across disparate aspects of police operations.” The University’s intellectual property helped support Benchmark’s launch and, now that the company is thriving, the data it’s collecting will support research by members of a consortium the University leads,” explained Rappaport, who studies criminal procedure and the criminal justice system. “What makes that data so unique is its breadth and granularity-in some cases, we’ll see everything the police departments see, including organizational structure, training, dispatch, arrests, use of force, complaints, and discipline. “The relationship between the University and Benchmark has come full circle. To try and understand this question, the team launched the National Police Early Intervention and Outcomes Research Consortium, which is chaired by University of Chicago Law School Professor and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar John Rappaport, who studies criminal procedure and the criminal justice system. The next big question, however, was the so what: If an officer is flagged as problematic, what do you do next? According to Huberman, there was almost no body of evidence to suggest what intervention would get an officer back on track. Ghani worked with the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to license this technology to Benchmark. “It was thoughtful research, but it lived in the four walls of the university,” said Huberman, who quickly saw the opportunity to have “broad impact by translating the research in way that is easily consumable by police firms.” This wealth of research for Benchmark meant they didn’t need to start from scratch, noted Huberman, who reached out to the University – with a team of several alumni and the confidence that they could leverage this work and make a difference. The work was led largely by Rayid Ghani, who is the former chief scientist of the Obama for America data analytics team and joined the University in 2013 working with the Computation Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy and as the director of the Center for Data Science & Public Policy and Data Science for Social Good, which today has moved to Carnegie Mellon University. The University developed a series of predictive models and algorithms that identify patterns of police officer conduct that lead to problematic behavior in policing. This insight is possible due to the company’s solution, First Sign® Early Intervention, which was developed based on years of longitudinal studies and analyses of officer conduct at the University of Chicago and its Center for Data Science and Public Policy, with support from the Joyce Foundation. “There needed to be a way that every police department didn’t need to create their own insight into that data,” explained Huberman. ![]() With centralized data management, Benchmark could then take a research-based approach to analyzing that data in a systematic way to understand if an officer was off track. To solve for this, the company developed an enterprise approach to people data management in public safety and policing, the Benchmark Management System®. On average, police departments were using between four and 17 different systems, said Huberman, which made it all but impossible to understand performance. The first part of this was helping police departments manage and collect critical data they should know about their workforce – information which the researchers found to be widely fragmented. “We said, this is really solvable so we should go out and start a company with the expressed purpose of solving meaningful police reform issues,” explained Huberman. ![]() Benchmark Analytics (Benchmark) was cofounded by Ron Huberman, MBA ‘00, CEO, who with other cofounders including fellow alum Sarah Kremsner, MPP ’03, began looking at the landscape of police accountability and reform and found that there were three aspects of this work that were fundamentally missing in order to affect positive change. ![]()
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