3 ms·

Incredibly cool to see this data released! I FOIA'd the same data twice and got rejected both times. Apparently the data was part of an active court case where

by bpchaps 11y ago

Incredibly cool to see this data released! I FOIA'd the same data twice and got rejected both times. Apparently the data was part of an active court case where ex cops were suing to get 4+ year old complaints deleted. It wasn't that surprising of an outcome, but... Damn.

rozap 11y ago
disclaimer: i'm an engineer at socrata the Obama administration has pushed for more cities to start publishing this data. While it's pretty light on standardization of formats between cities, it's still a step in the right direction. in the next year we're going to start seeing more cities publishing use of force data [1]. One neat example is Indiana's page here https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3 https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3 , though anonymized, you can still draw your own conclusions about things like race, sex, and age and how that plays into how willing the officer is to use force, and how far the force is taken [1] https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-police-data-initiative/ https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-p...
- danso 11y ago
  Hey, just want to say that you should tell your colleagues...great work! Last year I assigned my class [1] an exercise in HTML scraping the officer-involved shooting incidents of the Dallas PD (which was, with HTML tables, already far and away the most transparent department in this regard). Then a few months ago, I saw that the Socrata portal for Dallas now has the same exact data but as a spreadsheet/CSV...including URLs to the PDF narratives (I don't expect the narratives actually exist in a more parsable format on the basis of them being narratives)...and hell, that is not even the most interesting police-related dataset on the Dallas portal. Whatever your public-officials-facing evangelists are doing, they are doing it incredibly well, at a level that I would have never imagined when Socrata first popped up. [1] http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/ http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/ [1a] Another example of someone resorting to programming to collect this data (which is how I learned about its existence in the first place): https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting [2] https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-Officer-Involved-Shootin/4gmt-jyx2 https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...

by bpchaps 11y ago

rozap 11y ago

disclaimer: i'm an engineer at socrata the Obama administration has pushed for more cities to start publishing this data. While it's pretty light on standardization of formats between cities, it's still a step in the right direction. in the next year we're going to start seeing more cities publishing use of force data [1]. One neat example is Indiana's page here https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3 https://data.indy.gov/view/eg2v-uzn3 , though anonymized, you can still draw your own conclusions about things like race, sex, and age and how that plays into how willing the officer is to use force, and how far the force is taken [1] https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-police-data-initiative/ https://www.socrata.com/socrata-and-white-house-partner-on-p...

danso 11y ago
Hey, just want to say that you should tell your colleagues...great work! Last year I assigned my class [1] an exercise in HTML scraping the officer-involved shooting incidents of the Dallas PD (which was, with HTML tables, already far and away the most transparent department in this regard). Then a few months ago, I saw that the Socrata portal for Dallas now has the same exact data but as a spreadsheet/CSV...including URLs to the PDF narratives (I don't expect the narratives actually exist in a more parsable format on the basis of them being narratives)...and hell, that is not even the most interesting police-related dataset on the Dallas portal. Whatever your public-officials-facing evangelists are doing, they are doing it incredibly well, at a level that I would have never imagined when Socrata first popped up. [1] http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/ http://www.compciv.org/homework/assignments/dallas-ois/ [1a] Another example of someone resorting to programming to collect this data (which is how I learned about its existence in the first place): https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting https://github.com/dallasshooting/dallasshooting [2] https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-Officer-Involved-Shootin/4gmt-jyx2 https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...