We're activists, researchers, journalists, municipal workers, and other people interested in transparent government.
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.
There are tens of thousands of police agencies, and each has a unique way to publish information.
We're a small non-profit with ambitious goals and a tiny budget. Every bit helps!
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.
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, and transparency advocates can help incentivize police administrators to provide data in more accessible formats.
