Data

Data Overview

Esri is gaining a monopolistic hold on geo-spatial data and data management. Their products have become increasingly indispensable to police forces all across North America, making it crucial to understand how they are adopted and used.

How We Collected our Data

To investigate Esri’s role in policing, our research team:

Attended and observed Esri’s 2023 User Conference and the 2023 Summit on Security and Safety.
Reviewed Esri’s published materials for training police, including their law enforcement textbooks; crime analysis website; and webinars on policing and geo-spatial analysis.
Filed 60 Freedom of Information (FOI) requests with police departments and municipalities in Canada and the United States to obtain License Agreements, training documentation, purchase orders, and decision-making records on Esri product use.

Access the Data

Want to dive deeper? Access the raw data behind our map below.

The attribute table contains every location and related details gathered, while the variable key helps decode the meanings behind each data field. We encourage you to explore and engage with the data directly.

Our Process

With this website, we map out the various relationships between police forces and the Geographic Information System (GIS) software company Esri.

We do so in order to explore how police forces across Canada and the USA increasingly rely on GIS to carry out their work, and to show the growing dependence of police departments on Esri—its ever-expanding list of law-enforcement products and trainings, its spatial data repository, and its insistence on positioning itself as the industry standard.

Research Questions

We asked, what tools and technologies does Esri offer to police forces in Canada and the USA? How do police forces in Canada and the USA use Esri’s tools? And, what do the relationships between Esri and police forces in Canada and the USA look like?

Methods

To answer these questions, we made public records requests, collected documents and information from Esri and police websites, and attended and observed the 2023 Esri User Conference and Safety & Security Summit.

Public Records Requests

From October 2022 to December 2024, we submitted public records requests to municipal governments and police departments in 60 cities in Canada and the USA. Forty-five sent us records.Three have ignored our requests — meaning that two or more requests were made and left outstanding, at this point for a year or longer. Six refused to provide records. Six responded that they have no records to provide.

We selected cities for public record requests to vary in size and geographic region. Some of the cities we selected were ones that we knew had a police-Esri relationship because Esri featured the police department on their website, or we could view an ArcGIS (Esri’s mapping software) map on the police department’s website. For other cities, we knew the city’s police department was likely to be using geospatial technology because of a highly publicized police killing that was connected to hot spot policing. For others, we did not have any idea of whether or not there would be a police-Esri connection.

We asked for records going back to 2005 from both police and the City agency that is in charge of procurement or technology contracts (varies by city). We did this because some police forces contract directly with Esri, some partake in the City’s contracts, and some records sit with police even when it is another entity in a city government that holds the contract.

When we began the public records requests in 2022, we asked for a large number of documents and details. However, we noticed that the responses would in many cases be delayed for very long periods of time or be ignored. In late 2023, we shifted strategies, asking specifically for the License Agreement. Once this was provided, we followed up with additional requests. We found this to be a more fruitful approach. Nevertheless, the records that most cities and police forces provided us with were quite patchy, with many cities or police forces providing only partial information.

Sample Public Records Request to Police

I am seeking documentation of the _____ Police Department’s interactions with and use of software products from the company Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute) [or Esri Canada].

I request:

copies of License Agreements with Esri. This can include, if they exist, any documentation of extensions of the license agreement.
invoices, purchase orders, or receipts for the purchase of any Esri product/services for the ____ Police Department.
if the ____ Police Department is covered by an Advantage Agreement with Esri, the Advantage Program Task Order forms for consultancy and training.
the Usage Report of Deployments for each year
a list of Esri License Software that ___ Police Department uses.
the number of ___ Police Department employees who use the Esri software.
MOUs with Esri.
any briefings or bulletins that mention Esri or ArcGIS.
if the ___ Police Department is not directly contracted with Esri but instead is using Esri software and products through a License Agreement held by another department of the City of ___, I would like to know that. And, I would like a copy of the relevant License Agreement, renewals, or extensions. I seek these materials for the time period extending from January 1, 2005 through present.

This request is not being made for commercial purposes.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sample Public Records Request to Other City Department

I am seeking documentation of the _____ Police Department’s interactions with and use of software products from the company Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute) [or Esri Canada]. I have requested documentation directly from the __PD. However, in some cities the Police department’s software licenses and software purchases happen through another city department.

If the ____Police Department is using Esri software and products through a License Agreement and/or Advantage Agreement held by another department of the City of ____, I would like:

a copy of the License Agreement, renewals, or extensions, as well as the Advantage Agreement that covers the police use of Esri software. I seek these documents for 2005 through the present.
documentation or written affirmation that ____ Police Department uses Esri software products through the License Agreement of another department.
invoices, purchase orders, or receipts for the purchase of any Esri product/services for the ____ Police Department.
if the ____ Police Department is covered by an Advantage Agreement with Esri, the Advantage Program Task Order forms for consultancy and training.
the Usage Report of Deployments for each year
a list of Esri License Software that ___ Police Department uses.
the number of ___ Police Department employees who use the Esri software.
MOUs with Esri.
any briefings or bulletins that mention Esri or ArcGIS.
I seek these materials for the time period extending from January 1, 2005 through the present.

This request is not being made for commercial purposes.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Observations at Esri Materials for Police Users

One member of our team attended the 2023 Esri User Conference (July 10-14, 2023), and the pre-conference Safety and Security Summit (July 8-9, 2023) in San Diego, California. She took 51 typed pages of notes on content and ethnographic observations, photographs of displays, and attended presentations by and for police on how to use Esri’s law enforcement and public safety tools.

Other Documents: At the User Conference, we collected 2 physical textbooks, 1 e-book, and other literature that Esri sells to teach police how to use ArcGIS and Esri products. We reviewed these, as well as Esri’s webinars and the law enforcement pages of their website. We also examined the websites of the police departments where we filed requests.

Data Analysis

A team of us reviewed all of the documents that came in, including public records requests, Esri documents, and the ethnographic notes.

Many cities have not digitized or retained information about contracts going back more than a few years. The information we received from cities was highly variable in quality, with redactions and omissions from some requests and a surprising amount of detail from others. This makes it difficult to track down consistent information that can be used to compare Esri-police relationships across sites.We determined that we would not be able to find quantitative relationships between size of police budget and number of Esri users on the police force, for example. We determined that we would need to conduct a thematic analysis and develop a set of case studies.

Two members of our team assembled the information into an attribute table for geo-visualization in the form of the web map on this website. This table included geolocation data for the police headquarters, the kind of Esri license agreement that the police participated in, the size of the city, the size of the police department, the size of the police department budget, as well as what information we were able to collect on the number of police users, years of the contract with Esri, any and all trainings, and public transparency tools that the police publish with Esri, and any relevant information about police use of Esri products that came up in our searches.

Three members of the team analyzed the data for themes. We then developed the intensive case studies featured on this website. The case studies demonstrate the various ways that Esri-police relationships in different cities reflect these themes. We used data and information from the Esri User Conference observations, Esri’s training materials, and Esri and police websites to deepen our case studies.

DATA