Our mission is to make data from every U.S. police agency accessible via a single public resource.
To do it, we're using open-source code written by transparency activists to collect public data from police websites. This is a massive project, and we're just getting started.
We can make better use of public data to understand the police systems around us.
There are over 18,000 police organizations, and each has a unique way to publish information. To cope with this complexity, we're embracing grassroots principles and creating a model which centers the needs of local communities.
We're building a searchable database of police data sources in the United States.
A data source could include information about police activity, or structural characteristics of each department. Contributors of any skill level can find and submit data sources to the database. As our database approaches coverage of all police agencies, people spend less time finding data and more time using it.
The community maintains an open-source code repository to extract useful information from any data source.
Data scientists of any experience level can learn skills as they contribute code under the mentorship of other community members. Scraped data is even more useful, for everything from internal government reporting to criminal justice reform efforts.
Our infrastructure will automatically archive and scrape each data source.
As we create backup copies of publicly available data, the quality and availability of our archive becomes better over time. Valuable data is kept secure from loss due to risks like mismanagement, technical failure, and policy changes.
We're developing a gold standard for police transparency and data accessibility.
Citizens and governments can evaluate local departments against this standard, transparency advocates can help improve the systems in use, and an open-source model is established for transparency with other types of municipal data.
We welcome criminal justice experts, journalists, researchers, activists, government workers, and anyone else working on the common goal of transparency.
Our software will help different segments of the community work together, and incentivize police administrators to provide data in a format which is easily consumed by local government—and the rest of us.
To unite these core functions, we're building web tools to give everyone access to our archives and Scrapers. If you're reading this, there's still work to do.
Contribute code Meet us on Discord
If you have used police data for any kind of project, we'd like to hear from you. Tell us about your work in Discord or by emailing [email protected].
