Buttigieg fails to understand tech: the state of South Bend open crime data

For the last 10 years, SpotCrime has been attempting to access public crime data from South Bend Indiana with no luck. More often than not South Bend has made excuses as to why they are unable to share data.

All the while South Bend police department has been willingly providing data to a paid third party vendor. Allowing a preferential private company better access to public information is not in the interest of transparency.

Doing this locks the data in a siloed and controlled environment that can’t be inspected, therefore, reducing accountability. If the press and the public are restricted from counting and sharing the data then how is putting it on a map useful?

Back in 2017 SpotCrime was successfully able to get an excel file that included a list of incidents that occurred throughout the day in South Bend.

Check out and download the raw data here.

When we went to request data again in 2017, we were told their system moved from UCR to NIBRS and could no longer produce the data for us.

Recently, on February 28 of this year we requested data again and on March 6 we received a response that the department was still unable to produce the crime data because of the move from UCR to NIBRS. Essentially an upgrade to a reporting system resulted in a downgrade to transparency with the public.

What is even more frustrating is Mayor Pete Buttigieg has championed transparency via the South Bend open data portal however, crime data has been left off of the portal. Crime data is the most demanded open dataset by the public. How can Mayor Buttigieg champion open data while giving a private party exclusive access to the most sought after public dataset?

Allowing this problem to go on for more than a year demonstrates an almost intentional priority to not be transparent crime crime data. There is inherent incongruity with the obscure explanation that a police department can filter the data for a vendor to report publicly, but can not filter for public access.

Last week, in our conversation with a local media outlet, we learned that on March 5 (a day before we received a response from South Bend PD that they were unable to send us data) the South Bend PD had sent an email out to all media outlets letting them know that crime logs with incident crime data will be published to their website.

When we checked out the media logs we were further disappointed to find that the logs are scanned images of printed out paper. The logs are available for download, but in a PDF format of those scanned images.

This is not open data. This is not an acceptable way of distributing data for a city of this size in 2019.

The pdf is a print out from a database. Which means they can filter for public data. Additionally, publishing data to a PDF introduces the risk for error when copying the data. Why not publish that data to the South Bend open data portal to help reduce human error? Making it harder to grab data is making it harder for good data to get out to the public.

We reached out to Chief Ruskowski and Mayor Buttigieg for comment. We have only received a response from Mayor Buttigieg's Chief Innovation Officer Denise Linn Riedl:

“The City of South Bend has an agreement with a third-party vendor to publish crime data, which is publicly available with other SBPD documents and data at police-southbend.opendata.arcgis.com. While these efforts underscore the City’s commitment to transparency, the work is far from over. Our team is collaborating across departments to release data in more accessible formats.”

In other words, there is an indefinite amount of time as to when the data will be made open. This is unacceptable.

We let the city know that currently the data is not available in an open format by the current vendor. The vendor does have an open API available, but South Bend is not utilizing this resource. SpotCrime has asked South Bend to turn on this API of little or no avail.

South Bend needs to deliver the media log as a machine readable format, like hundreds of agencies across the US are already doing. They need to publish this data openly for anyone to access, use, and share.

If you feel the same way, please reach out to the South Bend contacts below. Let them know that you value transparency with crime data. Encourage South Bend to publish crime data to the open data portal.

Chief of Police Scott Ruszkowski
sruszkow@southbendin.gov
574.235.9201

Mayor Pete Buttigieg
pbuttigieg@southbendin.gov and mayorpete@southbendin.gov

574.233.0311

Safety begins with knowing.