Santa Cruz, CA
An innovative collaboration between students and campus law enforcement has enabled the UC Santa Cruz Police Department to launch a dynamic new Crime Visualization Dashboard, offering greater insight into campus safety and police activity.
The dashboard—developed as part of a multi-quarter Senior Design Project by computer science students through their instructor Richard Jullig—aims to bring clarity, accessibility, and transparency to crime data across the UC Santa Cruz campus. The final phase of the three-phase project, known internally as Crime Visualization Dashboard 3.0, was led by students Soham Rajadhyaksha, Jiemas Rubio, and Mignot Mesele, with sponsorship from UCSC Police Chief Kevin Domby, Deputy Chief Ramon Romo, and Police ITS expert Kevin Young.
“This initiative reflects our department’s commitment to data-driven policing and to being transparent with the campus community,” said Chief Domby. “It’s not just about collecting data—it’s about using it to inform decisions and improve safety for students, faculty, and staff.”
Turning Data into Decisions
The UC Santa Cruz Police Department handles dozens of calls each week. Every incident, ranging from routine traffic stops to felony crimes, is documented and stored in a record management database. The database’s previous visualization tool was difficult to use and is also no longer receiving support from the vendor. The new dashboard addresses these issues by presenting crime data in an interactive, user-friendly online interface.
Users can view categorized crime data, time trends, and geographic mapping of reported crimes and incidents—features that enhance both public awareness and efforts to strengthen community safety.
A Multi-Quarter, Student-Driven Effort
The project began in winter quarter 2024 as a student-led project with developers Nicholas Reis, Nicolas Martinez, Brandon Lau, Harsh Jha, and Jose Patino. Development continued through the fall quarter with new contributors, Matthew Dang, Kevin Tran, Van Ly, and Taylor Yee. The third and final student group picked up the project in winter quarter 2025, finalizing and deploying the dashboard by the end of spring quarter.
Throughout the project, students overcame technical challenges, including server code issues, limited documentation, and the intricacies of working with Microsoft Power BI. Despite the obstacles, the team delivered a polished, functional tool that underwent beta testing and is now live on the UC Santa Cruz Police Department website.
Building for the Future
Beyond technical success, the project emphasized long-term maintainability. Students worked closely with IT consultants and police staff to ensure the system can evolve with future needs.
“This wasn’t just a class project—it’s a real tool that will help guide our safety efforts for years to come,” said Deputy Chief Romo.
Acknowledgements
The team wanted to thank everyone who made the dashboard possible, including the UC Santa Cruz PD staff, RIMS IT consultant Daryl Jones, the CSE115 series instructor and TAs Prajas Kadepurkar, Roy Shadmon, Seongsil Heo, and Firouz Vafadari, the past student developers, and beta testers Zachary Venzor, Tiffany Guan, Anirudh Sriram, Nathan Wong, Serene Cheng, Mario Vital, Ryan Chen, Jane Chavarria, Nathan Tran, Nikolas Makranyi, Jim Watson, Peter Lee, Andrew Byi, Jianwen Wu, Joshua Sharma, Giovanni Abulkheir, and others.