Our police system is decentralized. In response, our approach is to build locally first. PDAP is developed in collaboration with the community of people who need police data for their work: activists, researchers, journalists, municipal employees, and individuals interested in understanding their local police system.
Combined, this work represents a national accounting of police transparency, policy, and accessibility.
We're building utilities and infrastructure to empower people who are interested in using police data.
Think Wikipedia meets Open States meets Internet Archive.
The PDAP non-profit builds a collection of open-source apps and services to help the community write scrapers and archive data.
PDAP is the steward for the archives. It ensures the data is verifiable and freely accessible.
PDAP sets a high standard for Scraper quality, and runs trainings to help the community meet it.
The PDAP community writes and maintains a vast library of Scrapers to cover every U.S. police agency.
The community is built on a mutual aid model, where the people using police data have the agency to collect and share it—as well as a community of fellow data nerds to help.
The PDAP non-profit has a traditional structure.
The PDAP board is Eddie Brown, Alec Akin, and Josh Lintag.
Our paid staff are Josh Chamberlain and Jacob Quinn Sanders.
The PDAP community is decentralized, with flat hierarchy and community governance.
Micro-communities of volunteers spring up around geographic regions or types of data, working together on their corner of the criminal justice world.
The PDAP non-profit is funded by grants and individual contributions.
The PDAP community is supported as a key program of the non-profit.
It uses the distributed computing power of its members to balance the workload.
It uses grassroots principles to connect people with information as cost-effectively as possible.
Check out our pitch deck here, and our roadmap here.
We're compiling police data that's already public into a unified, accessible resource.
We aren't a watchdog—our activism is data collection and accessibility, not analysis or research.
Kristin Tynski kicked off this project by scraping records from her own community. Our community gained momentum on Reddit.
Yes. We're consolidating public information, in accordance with established legal precedents.
No. Our only motivation is to provide trusted data in an age of disinformation. Our members have diverse perspectives and goals for police institutions, but we are united by the common goal of transparency.
Every step in our process is accessible and transparent. We believe web3 principles are key to our success and longevity.
We're a 501c3 non-profit. We are accepting donations. The bulk of our 2022 funding comes from The Heinz Endowments.
