CONCORD, CA (July 17, 2025) — I recently joined a bipartisan group of more than 170 mayors from across the country in Tampa for the 93rd annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. We celebrated the resilience of America’s cities and discussed ways to protect and advance the progress cities have made in recent years.

Throughout the three days, I participated in discussions with fellow mayors from cities big and small around topics including recalibrating federal immigration enforcement, protecting local control in public safety, preserving economic growth, and continuing to improve cities’ affordability and quality of life.

I spoke on a panel entitled “A Whole Government Approach to Public Safety” along with New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. This was an opportunity to showcase our mid-sized city’s use of a data integration and visualization platform that consolidates data from multiple law enforcement, city and community sources into actionable dashboards to enable the Concord Police Department to make data-driven decisions.

One focus area is traffic safety. The platform creates collision and enforcement heatmaps that visualize DUI, speed, and injury crash data to guide traffic enforcement and road engineering solutions. The heatmaps also support strategic placement of our motor officers and grant-funded operations – Selective Traffic Enforcement Program, DUI checkpoints, etc.

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The platform enables Concord PD to cross reference traffic and speeding complaints from the community with crash and citation data to prioritize enforcement and collaboration with our Traffic Engineering & Transportation Planning Division.

Another area of focus is mental health response. The platform displays mental health-related calls for service (code #5150) to identify hotspots and time-of-day patterns, supports coordination with Mobile Crisis Response Teams (MCRT) and mental health clinicians by tracking repeat contacts and intervention outcomes, and enables real-time and dynamic reporting of mental health calls for service.

This has led to a stronger partnership with Contra Costa County Health Services’ A3 (Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere) Crisis Response. As a result, the number of 5150 holds by the Concord Police Department decreased by 26% from 2021 to 2024. Utilization of A3/MCRT by patrol officers increased by 180% from August 2023 through December 2024.

The public safety panel was one of the most well-attended of the entire conference. Mayors and staff from other cities were deeply interested in learning how Concord’s use of a data integration and visualization platform breaks down silos between city departments and the Police Department, enables PD command staff to make timely, data-informed deployment decisions, and enhances public reporting, grant justification and cross-agency collaboration. City leaders want to deploy limited public safety resources in the most efficient and effective way possible. I am proud that the city of Concord is leading the way in this area.

Contact Mayor Obringer at carlyn.obringer@cityofconcord.org