You might try defining what the "ideal" department's data would look like: what categories of data, what columns each record has, what the values are for each, etc. Ideally you'd stamp it with a year and give it a spiffy name so it could be the National Police Data Reporting Standard 2022 (NPDRS.2022) or something.
Departments that are trying to be transparent (or who just don't want to deal with figuring it all out from scratch) may be happy to adopt something considered a "standard" for tracking and reporting data. In some cases it means it is a checkbox they can check without having to deal with annoying people and their annoying questions... but that hardly matters so long as the data is made available. It would also give companies developing software for police departments a target to aim for.
Working forwards like this is definitely the right solution if it's achievable. I have worked with some government and police datasets, and they reflect that the records-keeping approach is very much designed with the old-world use case of manually reviewing individual records. For example, a record of a traffic collision would be perfectly fine if you wanted to go back see what happened in a specific collision. However, if you wanted to run an analysis over a set of collision records, you would run into problems like vehicle types being specified as 'free text' (anything can be entered), with no standard set of vehicle classifications (like an enumeration).
Departments that are trying to be transparent (or who just don't want to deal with figuring it all out from scratch) may be happy to adopt something considered a "standard" for tracking and reporting data. In some cases it means it is a checkbox they can check without having to deal with annoying people and their annoying questions... but that hardly matters so long as the data is made available. It would also give companies developing software for police departments a target to aim for.