The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday announced a dashboard for data on the jail’s population.

The dashboard aims to give the public a daily look at the jail population and will be updated every day. It will also include information on the number of people in custody, demographics, arresting agencies, offense levels and more.

“I believe that any conversation about public safety must begin with accurate information,” said Sheriff Dawanna Witt. “By launching this data dashboard, we are giving the public access to up-to-date information about the population in our jail. These tools and the jail data dashboard launching today are part of my commitment to openness and transparency.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, a leading civil rights nonprofit, says the interactive dashboard is mostly positive. 

“Transparency is really important, particularly when it comes to when we’re keeping people incarcerated,” Alicia Granse, staff attorney with the ACLU of Minnesota, said. 

Ensuring guardrails are in place to ensure the data is protected and making sure a tool like this is handled carefully — due to the sensitive nature of the information — will be key in this, Granse adds. 

“People can look at the same data and make different conclusions, [so] we always want to be thinking about, ‘is this helping or hurting when we present data to the public,'” Granse said. 

The dashboard can be found here.

A video on how to use the dashboard can be viewed here.