The Data behind Neighborhood Safety in Saint Paul

Supporting Young People in a New Way

Andrew Mua didn't start out as a data analyst.

"My first professional work family was at the Brooklyn Bridge Alliance for Youth," he says. "I loved it there. We'd do a lot of research to find out what the young people in Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park were telling us they needed. That's how I learned how data could be used to change policy and program delivery for the community."

As much as he loved working directly with young people, Andrew realized that he could do even more to support youth by going back to graduate school for a master's in data science. His education and Saint Paul's needs aligned perfectly, at just the right time. "As I was applying for jobs, I saw that Saint Paul's Office of Neighborhood Safety was looking for a data analyst," he remembers. "It was a great fit."

Since he joined the team in January 2025, Andrew has been building the systems and processes ONS needs to collect information consistently, analyze it rigorously, and interpret it in ways that help us get better at keeping Saint Paul residents alive, safe, and free.

The Human Stories Behind the Numbers

His background in on-the-ground outreach work lets Andrew make human sense of the vast amounts of information ONS staff members generate in the course of their daily work.

Every time they interact with someone around the City, Project PEACE and Familiar Faces employees generate what's called a "service note," a written record of the interaction: Who they talked to, where and when, and what happened. Because those service notes were in narrative form, rather than in neat cells on a spreadsheet, there was no easy way to analyze all the data they contained. "It's a challenge to pull meaning from the data."

Turning huge quantities of writing into countable categories is called thematic analysis, and A.I. can do it very quickly and mostly well enough. But Andrew didn't just want to extract the themes from the stories; as a former youth worker himself, he wanted to understand what ONS team members do from the inside out.

"I read every single service note from 2025," he explains, "and pulled common themes from them." How many notes? "Five thousand, six thousand?" He smiles. "When it comes to actually understanding the work, you really have to get into it."

Reading all those notes gave him a deep appreciation for the work ONS staff do every day. "Sometimes a life coach from Project PEACE will be working with a young person," Andrew says, "and some interactions are very wholesome. Others are very hard. But those hard moments often turn into beautiful stories, too."

From Data to Insight for Better Service

Andrew's thematic analysis let him create a data taxonomy, a list of the individual pieces of information that ONS staff want to keep track of day to day. That list let him customize ONS's case-management software to the actual needs of our on-the-ground staff.

Nowadays, Andrew reports, "Familiar Faces and Project PEACE have got a pretty good flow of logging their daily outreach." He's also helping those teams improve their data-entry system to capture more information in new ways. Life coaches, for example, want to start tracking their clients' goals: "If clients have short-term goals, how many of them are being completed in the desired timeframe? If they're not being completed, why aren't they?" That kind of insight will help ONS team members serve Saint Paul residents even better.

The information ONS staff record now flows through the case-management system into a custom-built ONS database-which marks a huge step forward in ONS's evolution from a scrappy start-up into a core City service.

• That database is how we know that, in 2025 alone, Project PEACE team members spent 346 hours working directly with Saint Paul residents across 1,274 individual interactions.
• It's how we know that, over 18 months, the Familiar Faces team prevented 2,771 calls to 911 and got over 50 people off the streets into safe and permanent housing.
• And it's how we know that, on average, every day, ONS team members are building connections with 35 individual Saint Paul community members, while doing deep, direct case management and client service 12 times.

Next Up: Adding Neighborhood Safety to Open Information

The next step, Andrew says, is to turn the data in the database into a dashboard. "We're developing the dashboard as a tool to improve service delivery first," he explains. "It's going to empower our staff to actually see the product of their work in a way that sharpens our program and service delivery. Eventually, we'll have an ONS dashboard on Open Information Saint Paul for the public to see."

This work is difficult and often solitary, but Andrew takes inspiration by focusing on the human stories that make ONS data meaningful.

"A lot of times, you see data analysis take the human characteristics out of the work," he explains. "But this is very, very human work." Andrew makes sure it stays that way.

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