We envision a world where accessible data helps us create more just government systems. To achieve this, we're building a space for people to access data, share best practices, and collaborate with others.
We've made progress on the most important part of our toolkit: a national directory of public records about every U.S. police agency. People use it to find and share Data Sources.
We've started making case studies like this Calls for Service web scraper by working with data users to understand their needs.
We made a living database of agencies in the criminal legal system. We're not aware of a more complete one.
We only write when there's news. View the archives here.
We're indexing police Data Sources for every agency in the U.S. criminal legal system.
Currently, local groups use data independently. At best, we trade information via email and spreadsheet.
We're making tools to help people organize and share their Data Sources so they can spend less time finding data and more time using it.
Web scraping is a common technique for answering deeper questions about the police.
The community maintains an open-source code repository with shared resources for extracting useful information from records found at any Data Source.
Data users of any experience level can develop skills as they collaborate with other community members.
Some sources of data are vulnerable, or regularly removed. PDAP publishes models and resources for low-cost archiving of critical data.
The community of people already using police data decide which records should be preserved. As we add community archives to our Data Sources database, valuable data is kept secure from loss due to risks like mismanagement, technical failure, and policy changes.
By documenting the data available in every local criminal legal system, we're developing a gold standard for police transparency and data accessibility.
Citizens and governments can evaluate local departments against this standard, and transparency advocates can help incentivize police administrators to provide data in more accessible formats.
