Contingent Security Services, Ltd. helps law enforcement agencies and private-sector security teams turn fragmented data into decisions — with AI strategy, analytics, and intelligence support built by practitioners, not theorists.
Outcomes delivered across municipal policing, intelligence, and national-scale analytics programs — led by founder Joel Vargas, JD.
The mark of Contingent Security Services, Ltd. — the knight for protection and public safety, the gear and circuits for the technology and data work behind it.
“While many are still catching up to the Information Age, the AI revolution is already here. Our mission is to ensure both law enforcement and the private sector aren't just a part of the future, but equipped to lead it together.”Joel Vargas Head of AI and Data Analytics, Contingent Security Services, Ltd.
Fifteen years of practice, organized into ten service lines. Select a service to see what an engagement includes.
Modern threats don't respect the line between public and private. Neither do our engagements.
From a single department to multi-jurisdictional operations spanning hundreds of jurisdictions, we help agencies of every size build intelligence-led operations: CompStat-style accountability, NIBRS-based trend analysis, gang and narcotics crime-reduction models, and the data systems that make them run — under strict law-enforcement rules and governance.
Corporate security teams, airports, seaports, and supply-chain operators face transnational threats that local data alone can't explain. We bring intelligence support programs, risk models, and AI strategy that connect your security operation to the wider threat picture — and to the public agencies protecting the same ground.
Contingent Security Services has evolved with the field — each step building the complete enterprise capability we deliver today.
Focus on Artificial Intelligence. The firm begins by giving agencies on-demand access to professional intelligence analysis — and an early, deliberate bet on AI.
Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analysis. Engagements expand into the technology and data foundations agencies need to run analysis themselves.
Complete Enterprise Solution. Analysis, technology, and command decision-making come together in a single enterprise offering.
Focus on Serving the Underserved Law Enforcement Community. Our current initiative brings enterprise-grade intelligence-led policing within reach of the small and mid-size agencies that need it most.
Our consultants are former senior managers from some of the largest police departments in the United States and abroad, alongside specialists from military and civil intelligence, the private sector, and policy.
Our core technology offerings for agencies and corporate security teams — CompStat and NIBRS dashboards in Power BI and Tableau, automated CAD/RMS data pipelines, AI strategy and implementation, and decision-support tools that turn fragmented records into a single, decision-ready operating picture.
We can work with your team and the vendor to incorporate best practices during the data cleaning process before it is moved to the cloud or new vendor.
Proven models to disrupt, dismantle, and eliminate gang crime — including our partnership work with The Gang Professionals Company.
Intelligence and operating models for crime that crosses borders, jurisdictions, and languages.
Expertise in combating international and domestic terrorism, drawn from practitioners across five continents.
Analysis and strategy against organized criminal enterprises targeting communities and businesses.
Port and transport security expertise, including leadership roles with the InterPort Police — the International Association of Airport and Seaport Police.
Deep regional specialization, with consultants from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Israel.
Pre-transaction investigations for buyers, investors, and counsel — verifying principals and partners, surfacing hidden liabilities, litigation and regulatory exposure, and reputational risk before a deal closes.
Close protection and travel security for executives and high-profile individuals — advance work, secure movement, and protective planning built around the principal's real risk profile.
Investigations into counterfeiting, trademark and copyright infringement, and trade-secret theft — identifying sources, documenting evidence, and supporting enforcement and litigation.
Enterprise risk assessments and mitigation planning for corporate security teams — threat and vulnerability analysis, security program reviews, and practical controls matched to the operation.
Security support for companies entering new markets and opening new facilities — site and location risk assessments, local threat picture, and security planning for domestic and international growth.
Protection for goods in motion and at rest — cargo theft and supply-chain risk analysis, route and facility assessments, and security programs for warehouses, yards, and distribution networks.
Security and intelligence support for the systems communities depend on — energy, water, transportation, communications, and healthcare facilities. Vulnerability assessments, threat monitoring, and resilience planning that keep essential services running under real-world threats.
Protection for sensitive facilities, personnel, and information of national significance — threat assessments, protective intelligence, and security planning for defense-related sites and assets, coordinated with the public agencies responsible for the same ground.
Eight years supporting agencies operating under consent decrees and external oversight across 180 cities — building the data collection, auditing, reporting, and accountability systems that demonstrate compliance and sustain reform.
Investigations into money laundering (AML), fraud, and financial misconduct — transaction analysis, asset tracing, and due diligence that connects financial records to the people and organizations behind them.
Led by top law enforcement professionals—including former ATF experts and managed through the National Crime Gun Intelligence Governance Board, this strategy relies on the immediate, 24-to-48-hour processing of crime gun data with fully interactive dashboards.
Leadership and build-out of Real-Time Crime Centers (RTCCs) and Security Operations Centers (SOCs) — staffing models, live data integration, watch-floor workflows, and the decision cadence that turns a center into an operational advantage.
Design and development of analytics and intelligence Centers of Excellence — the governance, standards, training, and shared services that let one strong team raise capability across an entire agency or enterprise.
Design and implementation of community-oriented policing programs built on crime prevention, outreach, and inclusion — problem-oriented policing, neighborhood and business engagement, and data that tracks trust and safety together. Recognized with an Award of Excellence in Community Policing in Bensenville.
Violence falls when enforcement is focused, data is honest, and the community is a partner — not an audience. We design violence reduction initiatives that target the people and places driving the harm, paired with community engagement that builds the trust and cooperation those strategies depend on. It is the approach behind a 70%+ crime reduction in Bensenville — 90%+ in targeted areas — and a 40% drop in gun violence in Chicago PD District 025.
Homelessness response breaks down when every agency, initiative, and property is working from a different picture. One of our latest projects builds the data foundation behind a homeless strategy — connecting calls for service, encampment and outreach information, and property-level impacts into one view, so cities, agencies, and property owners can target resources, coordinate outreach, and measure whether interventions are actually working.
Our models scale from a single agency to a multi-jurisdictional operation covering more than 400 jurisdictions and 14 languages — and in pilot deployments, straightforward models run under strict law-enforcement rules have produced crime reductions exceeding 50%.
Our practice is domestic in its base and international in its reach — built on coordination with allied services, advisory work in Latin America, and engagement with the institutions that set global security standards.
Coordination with intelligence and law-enforcement partners across the Five Eyes community — sharing threat picture, methods, and operational lessons with allied services.
Direct advisory work with heads of state and senior leadership in Latin America on security, intelligence, and institutional reform — grounded in deep regional specialization.
Work with the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on security, port, and transnational-crime issues.
Formal recognition by the Congress of Guatemala for contributions to security and intelligence cooperation in the region.
Development of a framework to combat human trafficking — connecting intelligence, victim protection, and enforcement across jurisdictions and borders.
Specialists drawn from the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Israel — assembled per engagement, in the languages the work requires.
We build inside the systems agencies and security teams already run — no rip-and-replace, no vendor lock-in pitch.
Joel Vargas founded Contingent Security Services, Ltd. and leads its AI and data practice. A Latin America intelligence specialist with more than 30 years of experience across risk management, law enforcement, and intelligence, he has served as a Crime Prevention Coordinator for a Chicagoland police department and as Director of Criminal Intelligence for the InterPort Police, a Criminal Intelligence Analyst with the Chicago Police Department, and a Crime Analyst Success Manager supporting 180+ cities at SoundThinking. He most recently served as a Division Manager with the Austin Police Department and is currently Head of AI & Data Analytics.
His work today focuses on the tools commanders actually use: CompStat comparisons, NIBRS-based trend reporting, and dashboards that hold up under operational scrutiny.
Contingent's consultants include former senior managers in some of the largest police departments in the United States and foreign countries, experts in Latin American intelligence, and specialists in international terrorism, domestic terrorism, organized crime, airport and maritime security, and transcontinental crime against the private sector and states.
We draw on a wide range of expertise from the private sector, military intelligence, civil intelligence, and federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies, as well as policy and political experts — assembled per engagement, so clients get exactly the bench their problem requires.
Engagements are scoped around the problem in front of you — a single dashboard rebuild, a standing intelligence-support arrangement, or a full decision-support build — and staffed by the consultants whose backgrounds match it.
Formal training in law and intelligence, and recognition earned across three decades of service.
Bensenville, InterPort Police, Chicago PD, SoundThinking, and Austin PD — Joel Vargas’s full career history is on LinkedIn.
Small-to-mid-size departments are being asked to deliver enterprise-grade intelligence, automated data pipelines, and modern AI/ML analytics — without the budget, headcount, or technical runway to build that capability in-house. That structural gap is where our work is focused.
Read these the way a chief or city manager would — honestly, not defensively. If more than a couple sound like your agency right now, the issue usually isn’t effort or commitment. It’s the data underneath the decisions.
CAD sits in one system, RMS in another, and jail and court records somewhere else again. When command asks a simple question, does someone have to pull three reports and stitch the answer together by hand?
CompStat and crime analysis still run on spreadsheets and printed maps. By the time the packet is ready for the briefing, has the pattern already moved?
The citywide number is down — but is it down on the blocks where residents actually feel unsafe? Averages can hide what is really happening at the neighborhood, beat, and street level.
NIBRS reporting takes hours of staff time every week. Is it informing a single operational decision, or has it become a compliance exercise that gives nothing back?
Your dashboard shows yesterday — or last week. Can it drill from the citywide picture down to the exact place and time crime is happening now, or does it stop at the headline number?
A multi-million-dollar system went live with training and fanfare — and then stalled. Are staff now working around it instead of with it?
Overtime keeps climbing, but can anyone show what is actually driving it — the calls, the places, the times — or is it simply absorbed as the cost of doing business?
Command staff ask direct questions in the room. How often does the honest answer have to be, “We don’t have that in the data”?
Veteran staff who know the work cold and newer staff who expect modern tools are working in the same building, on completely different technology. Who is bridging that gap?
When crime goes down, everyone wants the credit. When it goes up, no one wants the number. Is the argument about credit getting in the way of the work that actually moved it?
None of these are failures of leadership. They are what happens when the demands on command have outgrown the tools, systems, and staffing behind them.
hours a month of senior analyst support — included in every engagement
Senior-level data and analytics capability for law enforcement and public-safety agencies — deployed immediately, without a lengthy hiring process, and for a fraction of the cost of a single full-time hire. One partner, full-stack analytics capability from day one.
Your included hours aren’t locked to a single task. They can be split across several recurring projects at once — a CompStat refresh here, a reporting fix there — wherever the month’s priorities actually are.
When a bigger initiative comes up — a new system, a major reporting deadline, a department-wide rollout — the partnership scales up with it. Additional capacity when you need it, without renegotiating the whole engagement.
Point the hours at the specialized work your agency needs most — including consent decree metrics support and internal affairs analytics — the projects that are hardest to staff from inside a small team.
Throughout the engagement, we train your own people hands-on — crime analysts, officers, command staff, investigations, tactical and strategic units, RTCC, and fusion center staff — sharing our best practices and tools, so the program keeps running long after we step back.
The partnership isn’t limited to the monthly hours. Agencies can also bring CSS in on an ad hoc basis for a specific, one-off need — for example, a CompStat dashboard build-out and training — without committing to an ongoing engagement. One defined project, senior-level help to get it built, and your team trained to run it.
Start with a free data health audit. A no-cost assessment of your current data — and a sample dashboard built from your own records — so you can see what the partnership would deliver before you commit to anything.
Request Your Free AuditThese are the pressures chiefs name first — and the openings where a fractional, managed model changes what is possible.
CAD, RMS, and JMS records remain trapped in disconnected software systems. Command cannot see a single operating picture, and analysts spend their time moving data instead of analyzing it.
The mandated federal transition to NIBRS reporting overwhelms small administrative teams. The requirement is enterprise-grade; the staffing to meet it, for most agencies, is not.
Police chiefs require modern visual CompStat reporting and predictive patrol allocation. The demand at the command table has outpaced the analytics capacity behind it.
Enterprise-grade intelligence for agencies that have been priced out of building it themselves — CAD/RMS automation, CompStat dashboards, and analyst support delivered as a managed partnership rather than a hire.
The same pipelines and AI risk frameworks built for public safety translate directly to commercial clients — providing high-margin growth outside public procurement limits.
Drawn from the CSS Tech & Data Lab Business Plan (2026–2031) and Joel Vargas’s published writing on public-safety data, overtime, and technology. Talk to us about where your agency or company fits →
For years, retired chiefs and command staff have turned the trust and networks they built over a career into consulting work on their own terms. That same playbook is open to them — and to soon-to-retire sworn personnel, professional support staff, and the people who did the analytical work all along.
CSS Tech & Data Lab is looking for crime analysts, intelligence analysts, data analysts, researchers, public safety consultants, chiefs, command staff, soon-to-retire sworn personnel, and professional support staff — active, former, sworn, or civilian — who want to build a practice in their own metro area, backed by an established public-safety analytics firm.
You bring the relationships. We bring the infrastructure behind you:
A few quick questions. If you can answer yes to most of these, you likely already have what this takes.
If that sounds like you, schedule a meeting with us for a confidential conversation about your area, your network, and what a consulting practice could look like for you.
Schedule a MeetingIf you already consult and have your own clientele, you don’t need to start over — or give up what you’ve built. Partner with CSS Tech & Data Lab and bring your practice under an established public-safety brand, with our delivery team and back office behind you.
Partnership terms designed to reward the business you bring and the clients you serve — generously structured so partnering is worth more than going it alone. We’ll walk through the details in a confidential conversation.
Clear client protections for the relationships you’ve built. Your current clientele remains yours and is protected in the partnership — we support your clients with you, we don’t take them from you.
Immediately expand what you can offer the clients you already have — CompStat implementation, fully interactive dashboards, AI strategy, CAD/RMS support, and a dedicated technical delivery team — so you can grow quickly without hiring or building infrastructure yourself.
Already consulting and curious what a partnership would look like for your practice and your clients?
Schedule a MeetingArticles and assessments by Joel Vargas, J.D., on community policing, data analytics, intelligence-led policing, and the business of public safety. Select a title to read the full piece on LinkedIn.
Community-oriented policing is built around partnership, problem solving, trust, and shared responsibility between agencies and the communities they serve.
A policy discussion about enforcement strategies, institutions, communities, intelligence, and long-term public safety outcomes.
An assessment of how social media changes the intelligence environment and increases the importance of disciplined analysis and context.
A framework for building community policing around crime prevention, outreach, inclusion, and measurable relationships with residents.
A look at the consequences of fragmented data, disconnected systems, and decisions without a reliable path from information to action.
Why citywide averages can hide neighborhood-level patterns and how more precise analysis can guide public safety resources.
A practical examination of usable questions, sound data, clear ownership, and decisions that analytics teams can support.
A discussion of collaboration and the many contributors behind improved public safety outcomes.
An examination of overtime as an operational signal connected to staffing, workload, deployment, and service expectations.
Why technology adoption is also a workforce and leadership issue, and how agencies can close the gap.
What happens after a technology purchase, including adoption, workflow fit, data quality, governance, and operational discipline.
What it takes to build intelligence-led policing through stronger questions, integrated information, repeatable analysis, and timely decision support.
An intelligence perspective on how ordinary assets and transportation networks can connect to larger criminal markets.
A leadership-focused discussion of how better data practices can support clearer conditions, stronger questions, and more defensible decisions.
Whether it's an AI roadmap, a CompStat rebuild, or intelligence support for an operation — the first conversation is a working session, not a sales call.
Please use the phone or email information provided to get in touch.
