The SpotCrime Transparency Ranking Continued: Police Data Initiative Cities

The Police Data Initiative was created under the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing and ‘focuses on generating and implementing new data and technology innovations within key jurisdictions, civil society groups, and federal, state, and local agencies. PDI is centered on two key components: (1) using open data to build transparency and increase community trust, and (2) using data to enhance internal accountability through effective analysis.’

In other words, participating police agencies will start openly publishing datasets - ranging from incident data to arrests to police involved shootings. There is no set number of datasets police have to release in order to participate or a specific dataset that needs to be included.

The easiest data sets to start with are the reports that are already getting created and used internally. Majority of the time, a police agency is already circulating a daily call log or incident log that is pulled from the RMS/CAD. This is the type of data that gets consumed by SpotCrime.

We’ve decided to rank all of the 26 participating agencies in our Crime Data Transparency Ranking. Out of the 26 cities participating in the PDI, we already have 15 of those cities on our list, including:

Atlanta, GA

Austin, TX

Charlotte, NC

Cincinnati, OH

Dallas, TX

Denver, CO

Indianapolis, IN

Los Angeles, CA

Louisville, KY

New Orleans, LA

Oakland, CA

Philadelphia, PA

Seattle, WA

Spokane, WA

The 11 cities we’ve added to the ranking are:

Camden County, NJ

Columbia, SC

Fayetteville, NC

Hampton, VA

Knoxville, TN

Los Angeles County, CA

Montgomery County, MD - who based their open data feed off of SOCS!

Newport News, VA

Orlando, FL

Richmond, CA

Rutland, VT - who interestingly is the smallest city included with a population under 20k.

How did the cities rank?

More than half of PDI cities are already publishing data openly! We hope to see this data included on sites like the Public Safety Open Data Portal.

3 of the PDI cities are already making some sort of data available, but it may be months behind or it’s published in a non machine readable format.

7 of the cities do not have any feed available, but because of their participation in the PDI we are hopeful these cities will open up data soon.

There are a couple of agencies who receive a 0 ranking because they employ a proprietary crime mapping vendor.

In a lot of cities, we’ve found that an agency is already sharing a file with a crime mapping vendor and that same file can easily be shared with the public. A good example is in Temple, TX where SpotCrime is now mapping the same file their vendor gets.

In other cities, like in Denton, TX, we’ve found that the agency wants to share data, but the file is controlled by the vendor. In this case, we implore agencies to demand that the vendor share back a file that can be shared openly with the public.

We will be keeping an eye on these PDI cities and making updates to the ranking in the future!

Check out the crime data transparency ranking list of cities participating in the Police Data Initiative below. And for the full SpotCrime Transparency Ranking List, check out this post.