Police Data Initiative Creates Police Accountability

The Police Data Initiative is one of the programs rolled out by the White House’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing that encourages transparency with data. There are over 120 agencies participating in the PDI right now.

PROS AND CONS (mostly pros)

We’ve applied the SpotCrime Transparency ranking to PDI agencies below.

As critical as it may seem to rank agencies, the ability to even consider a ranking is one of the reasons why the PDI is so important. It gives the public a chance to see how their agency matches up against others, creating more accountability. This ranking is not meant to discourage, but rather act as part of a public feedback loop that encourages agencies to accept criticism and make their data stronger and more transparent.

PRO: Agencies can pick and choose which datasets they want to release giving the opportunity for more agencies to participate. The types of datasets include (but aren’t limited to):

 - RMS/CAD data
 - Use of force
 - Officer Complaints
 - Officer Involved shootings
 - Arrests
 - Summarized crime data (graphs and totals)
 - CCTV locations
 - Biased based policing
 - Traffic stops by Race and Ethnicity
CON: Giving agencies the ability to pick and choose leaves nationwide data ‘incomplete’, leaving it hard to see how one agency stacks up against the other.

PRO: Participate at your own pace.

CON: Movement at a snail's pace. Since there is there is no set timeline to start posting data agencies like Camden County, NJ, which has been listed as participating since inception, have yet to post a single dataset.

PRO: Publish what you have. A lot of police agencies are already publishing datasets for public consumption and are using these datasets to easily and seamlessly participate in the PDI.

CON: Publishing data ‘as is’ means there is no standardization occurring. One agency may be updating their dataset daily, while one (Hampton, VA) is only publishing when they choose. One arrest dataset could look completely different than another city’s arrest dataset. Some agencies are releasing machine readable formats (API, csv, xml) others are only publishing pdfs.

SpotCrime Crime Incident Data Transparency Ranking

Since we can only speak to crime incident data, we looked specifically for an up-to-date crime incident dataset (RMS/CAD data) that has been updated within the past couple of weeks within all of the agencies listed as participating in the PDI at the time this blog post was published (126 agencies).

We’ve noticed there are a few agencies have some sort of open crime incident data feed and aren’t listing the feed on the PDI website. We’re not sure why. However, if there is a feed available, even if it’s not listed on the website, we are taking it into consideration in our rankings.

0 Ranking

A 0 ranking means there is no way to get open access to incident crime data. We found that:

• 54 of the 126 agencies received a 0 ranking.
• 34 of 54 agencies have no crime data feed.
• 20 of the 54 agencies give data feeds to a vendor and do not supply and open crime data feed for the public. Proprietary crime mapping vendors typically restricts access to public crime incident information. The agency may think their crime data is public via these vendors, however, the data is not open. In other works - you can look at the data, but you can’t touch it. A solution to this is to create an open feed - open meaning data can be collected, used, and shared by anyone.

1 Ranking

A 1 ranking means there may be a way to get crime incident data, but there’s a caveat - data is not machine readable, it’s out of date, etc.

• 23 of the 120 agencies received a 1 ranking.
• 11 of the 23 agencies give better or more up to date data feeds to their vendors than to their public.

2 Ranking

A 2 ranking means there is an open and unrestricted crime data feed. These agencies are not favoring a vendor over the public, are updating their feed frequently, and data sets are machine readable. These agencies are great examples for others to follow.

• 49 of the 126 agencies have a 2 ranking.
• 23 of these 49 agencies utilize a proprietary crime mapping vendor, however, they give equal and fair access to the public as the do the vendor.
• A majority of these agencies post data to an open data website.

How did your agency matchup? Is your agency open with crime incident data? Are they participating in the PDI? Let us know and ask them to participate in the PDI!