The Detroit Police Department (DPD) was looking for a solution for how to identify, prioritize, and track the city's costliest “familiar faces” cases. Through WIT's Data Department in a Box, DPD gets a full data team — without the full-time hires — for one fixed monthly fee. WIT runs the entire matching and reporting pipeline every month in Microsoft Fabric, acting as DPD's outsourced data department.
Local Government/Nonprofit Organization
IT
Detroit, Michigan
Like most major cities, Detroit faces a persistent challenge - residents cycling through crisis after crisis because an underlying mental illness isn't being treated. Left unaddressed, these individuals end up consuming enormous amounts of public resources, such as police response, emergency medical services, jail beds, and behavioral health claims. Often without ever reaching the sustained care that would actually help them.
The Detroit Police Department (DPD) had already taken a smart first step. They are identifying “familiar faces,” the individuals with the highest volume of police interactions, refreshed every month. But a name on a list isn't enough. To prioritize outreach and funding effectively, DPD needed to know where else those same individuals were showing up across the city's systems and what it was costing to leave them untreated. The city's systems can include EMS encounters, Wayne County Jail bookings, and DWIHN (Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network) behavioral health claims.
That's a data engineering, data quality, and analytics problem. It's not a problem DPD had the internal staff or resources to solve. Hiring to solve this problem would mean building out an entire skill set (data engineering, matching and identity resolution, BI development, analysis) for what is, at its core, a recurring but part-time need.
This is exactly the gap WIT's Data Department in a Box (DDIB) offering is built for. Instead of standing up an internal data team - recruiting, hiring, and retaining separate specialists for data engineering, reporting, and analysis - Detroit Police Department engaged WIT for a fixed monthly block of hours. That gave them a full, cross-functional data capability on tap, scaled to the actual size of the problem, with no full-time headcount to manage.
Under the Data Department in a Box engagement, WIT acts as DPD's data department: collecting, cleaning, and matching data every month, then turning it into the dashboards and analysis that drive decisions. All without DPD ever needing to hire a data engineer, a BI developer, and an analyst separately.
Each month, WIT's team:
All of the data workflows and processing run in a Microsoft Fabric environment, giving DPD a modern, governed data platform without having to build or manage it themselves.
For DPD the value isn't just the monthly output, it's what they didn't have to do to get it. No job postings for hard-to-fill data roles. No managing a team through turnover. No paying for full-time capacity to cover what is fundamentally a recurring, cyclical workload. Instead, DPD gets a predictable monthly investment and a dedicated team covering data engineering, data matching, reporting, and analysis - the full range of skills a data department needs, delivered as a service.
By matching "familiar faces" across EMS, jail, and behavioral health claims data every month, DPD can now direct outreach and resources toward the individuals whose needs, and costs, span the most systems. That means care gets targeted where it will have the greatest impact, and the city gets a clearer, ongoing picture of what untreated mental illness is actually costing across its public safety and health systems.
About WIT
WIT is an analytics and automation consulting firm with over 30 years of experience. We help our clients build solutions to maximize the value of their data and analytics assets, and automate key business processes. In partnership with elite software companies, WIT’s capabilities span a broad spectrum of business functions and industry verticals. To learn more about the work we have done for our clients, visit Our Experience page.