UX discovery for VA Police Transparency

[davidmpickett]

Problem Statement

Legislation passed in 2022 requires VAMC websites to include data about VA police activity.
Deadline: One year after the enactment (December 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.

How might we

• help connect Veterans to VA police when they need help with safety or security matters
• provide access to facility-level police activity data, such as arrests, tickets, use of force, internal investigations, complaints, and disciplinary actions
• make direct contact information for the police force available so that employees and the public can request more information about VA police activity

Please see additional information in the Initiative brief - Background

Early data thoughts
Based on the legislation, we expect to display the following details - more information will be available pending technical discovery

• 5 years of data is required by legislation but beginning 10/1 we will have access to data going forward. Historical data (from a separate legacy system) will be available beginning in April 2024.
• data must be published in the website of each facility
• data/stats can be displayed as summary and must include
  • number of arrests
  • number of prosecutions, ticketing, and other actions relating to such arrests
  • number of tickets issued
  • the use of force and weapons discharge
  • number of complaints, investigations, and disciplinary actions regarding Department police officers
  • include direct contact information for the police force of the facility (including a POC from whom to request additional details about police interactions)

Michelle requested the following data fields 8/31

For a given facility

• Date/time period for data
• total number of calls/incident reports
  • types of calls, if available (such as reports of crime/suspected crime vs requests for service)
  • number of arrests resulting from those interactions
    • of those arrests, the total number resulting in prosecution, ticketing, and/or other actions
  • number of tickets issued
    • type of citation, if available
• total numbers of incidents in which force was used
  • type of force, if available
• number of incidents in which weapons were discharged by an officer
• number of complaints regarding Department police officers
  • of those complaints, how many resulted in investigation
  • of those investigations, how many resulted in disciplinary actions
• direct contact information for the police force of the facility
• if different, contact information for a Police force POC from whom to request additional details about police interactions

Resources for additional context

• Story about the relationship between New Jersey law enforcement departments and the Wilmington VA Medical Center Police in a Veterans Response Team collaboration

• Quick action by Wilmington VA Police saves Veteran

• K9 story

• Police officer recognized for assisting Veteran in crisis

• Veteran Mental Health Evaluation Team at VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System

• Press release about the impact on health care utilization

• Example VA Police detail pages

  • VA Oklahoma City health care
  • VA Northern California health care (also linked from Sacramento VAMC's Prepare for your visit “Security” accordion)

Examples

We have a short runway for figuring out how to access, represent, and visually display this important data. I did a quick search and learned that other jurisdictions, education, and healthcare settings have grappled with this same problem. We may be able to leverage their approaches to formulate our best guess on an MVP solution for our Veteran and beneficiary audiences.

• Cleveland Clinic Police and Security site
• Police Data Initiative
• Bellevue - Use of force
• Minneapolis crime dashboard
• Seattle - Arrest dashboard
• Harvard University Police Department
• UC Riverside Transparency Dashboard
• Drexel University Workload and Crime Dashboard
• CU Boulder Campus Police and Calls for service dashboard
• PowerBI dashboard example
• Regarding data definitions
  • Portland Police open data
  • Crime type definitions - Metropolitan Police (UK)

Existing Facility patterns

• Access to care is a separate website which provides Patient satisfaction and wait time data.
• Examples from Easter Colorado health care

This data is presented in health service accordions

Private Zenhub Image

and at the bottom of facility health service pages

Private Zenhub Image

with links to the Access to care site for the facility

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Questions and considerations

• How to provide definitions/explanatory context - in page or via link? (to where?)
• Does it need to be filterable by Veterans and beneficiaries?
• Inclusion of "as of" date
• Presenting data in mobile

Pending (Michelle requested 8/31)

• sample data
• data definitions
• expectation for whether a site where the data can be viewed and filtered by facility would be sufficient or if a display on each facility’s webpage is necessary

ACs

• Engineering options discussed with Steve Wirt
• Pros/cons considered for the following options:
  • Data is displayed on the facility home page
  • Data is displayed on a sub-page
    • If displayed on a sub-page, the best way for Veterans to find it (e.g., menu link, accordion link, non-clinical service link, etc.?)
• Findings documented in ticket comments
• Proposal for viable path forward MVP scope documented in ticket comments
• Review scheduled with Michelle, Jane, UX team (via UX refinement or otherwise)

[jilladams]

Reviewing this ticket while thinking about how we work on milestones / backing out a timeline from Dec launch, so suggested some ACs in ticket body, @davidmpickett / @xiongjaneg . Edit at wiil.

[xiongjaneg]

Two UX user considerations:

• What the Veterans see. What they see might not differ depending upon the data source.
• What the editors see.

The page displaying this information would ideally look the same in the short term vs. long term, whether Drupal or Lighthouse provides the data. The difference would be the backend source of data.

Assumption:
For example, VAMC Pittsburgh's data is on VAMC Pittsburgh's page (facility data is presented on the facility's page). So the Veteran doesn't need to go find a facility's data elsewhere.

[xiongjaneg]

@thejordanwood I added some specific considerations to the ACs to narrow down the many, many options for the Veteran experience, independent of how we get the data on the backend. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

[xiongjaneg]

The current assumption is that data will be updated on a monthly basis. So Pittsburgh's data, wherever it is presented, will show police activity stats for the month of Sept., and on and on.

Still awaiting info from the vendor on the granularity of that data, such type of offense, etc.

[thejordanwood]

@xiongjaneg Here are some design considerations for each option. Overall, I think my preference would be to create a sub-page, but we can make either work.

Data is displayed on the facility home page

Pros:

1. This would be on a visible page, which I assume would get more traffic than a subpage.
2. We can leverage the appointment wait time percentage box design (example).

Cons:

1. I don’t think the VA police stats will complement the information on the home page. Currently the home pages are very action oriented (Get health care, get updates, go to an event, read a story, etc.). (example)
2. I’m also concerned that this could potentially add clutter to the home page, since we don’t know how much data we’ll need to present. Home pages should be clear and concise.
3. We would definitely need to link off to another page for any additional information, similar to the "Learn more about Veteran satisfaction with access to care" links we have in the appointment wait time sections.

Data is displayed on a sub-page

Pros:

1. We could make these links visible by:
   • Adding a VA Police link to the “In the Spotlight” section
   • Adding a link to the sidebar navigation. The current police page examples have this within the Program section, but I think we could move it out of there into the top About section. This would put it on the same level as the About us, Work with us, Contact us, etc. Moving it up would make it more visible.
   • Current examples: VA Oklahoma City health care and VA Northern California health care
2. We can still leverage the appointment wait time percentage box design (example).
3. Potentially would not require us to link off to another page for more additional information. We could keep all explanations on one page, maybe by using reusable Q&As.

Cons:

1. Would need to create a new page for this. We could potentially reuse existing patterns to construct this page, but maybe not.

@aklausmeier Feel free to add any additional thoughts!

[aklausmeier]

Nice deep dive @thejordanwood. Based on what we know to date where each facility will have it's own dashboard and keeping possibilities open post-MVP, a sub-page with link under About us in side nav appears to be the clearest path for the user. *Hopefully we can lock in location of the facility police within the nav so this does not vary by facility.

[xiongjaneg]

Note: a sub-page refers to a VAMC system sub-page currently. There isn't currently any sub-pages per facility.

[xiongjaneg]

@xiongjaneg stub a ticket for follow up design for VAMC system sub-page for Police. Menu consideration TBD and not a blocker for sub-page design. DONE #15376