Our mission is to make data from every U.S. police agency accessible via a single public resource.
We're making a space for collaboration, and an open-source toolkit for people who use police data every day: activists, researchers, journalists, and government workers.
Our current focus is creating a database of criminal justice agencies, and a national directory of public records about every agency. This is a massive project, and we're just getting started.
There are tens of thousands of criminal justice agencies, and each has a unique way to publish information. Public records can be difficult to find, organized in confusing ways and kept behind bureaucratic request processes.
We're embracing grassroots and open-source principles to tackle this complex problem at scale.
We're a small non-profit with ambitious goals and a tiny budget. Every bit helps.
We're indexing police Data Sources for every criminal justice agency.
Currently, local groups use data independently. At best, they trade information via email and spreadsheet. This means duplication of effort, and hard-won records falling through the cracks.
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 scientists of any experience level can learn skills as they collaborate with other community members.
Our infrastructure will automatically archive 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, and transparency advocates can help incentivize police administrators to provide data in more accessible formats.
