Open crime data can address bad policing

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castille. The list goes on. All were victims of failed policing - use of force, implicit bias, ineffective policing, and bad community relationships.

Good policing relationships are based on trust. To obtain trust, transparency is needed to cultivate healthy police-community relationships fostering an effective and open accountability feedback loop between the police and the communities they serve. 

Crime datasets are a good place to start when building trust. Think of crime data transparency or open crime data as the basis for a grassroots (and free) neighborhood oversight board. This level transparency telegraphs a modern, progressive, and accountable police department that is focused on facing the data to improve operations. 

Asking for open crime data means requiring police agencies to release more than just annual FBI UCR/NIBRS data. It means demanding timely, robust, and raw datasets that are available for anyone to access, download, use, and share.

There are many public datasets available surrounding policing. The most important include the following:

Computer aided dispatch (CAD/911)	Shows the raw and robust inner workings of a police department - where, when, and how quickly officers respond to the community’s calls for service.
Records management system (RMS)	Shows when a report is taken and/or when a 911/CAD call is turned into an actual report. This report is a log of crimes within a city.
Use of force/police involved shootings	Shows when, how, and why an officer used force. It shows demographic information like where and who the force was used against.
Traffic stops	Shows when, where, and who is targeted, for what reason and if the traffic stop led to a criminal offense.
Arrest data	Separate from RMS data, it includes info on who was arrested, where, and why. It shows if an arrest was made for crimes recorded in the RMS.
Officer complaints/commendations	Shows which officers receive the most complaints/commendations and for what behaviors.

Individually each dataset can point out problem areas, and together the datasets paint a larger picture of police behavior as well as the crime rates of a city. The datasets give the ability to follow a crime throughout the entire criminal justice system - from the initial citizen call into the 911 center all of the way through to sentencing. 

This data is data that is in the public domain already via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, however, riddled with barriers to access surrounding each state’s FOIA laws. 

Another one of the biggest barriers to accessing this kind of data are the vendors hired to curate the data. Police agencies spend millions of dollars for CAD/RMS systems to keep track of this data and then are left with no way to openly release this data to the public because of their vendor’s ability to close off public access to the data. So instead of placing the data into the hands of the public, press, and researchers, police agencies have inadvertently given proprietorship of public information to private companies. 

We at SpotCrime are just asking for this data to be made openly and readily available proactively without barriers to access. We have been asking for CAD and RMS data to be released openly across the US for years. 

This ask is similar to what the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing attempted to address in 2014. In addition to outlining pillars for policing, the Task Force created the White House Police Data Initiative (PDI). 

PDI participating agencies

The PDI ‘promotes the use of open data to encourage joint problem solving, innovation, enhanced understanding, and accountability between communities and the law enforcement agencies that serve them’. The PDI is not federally mandated meaning it works on an opt-in or volunteer basis by police agencies. 

Within about 2 years, the PDI championed 130 participating agencies. Since 2016 that number has stagnated. There are over 18,000 police agencies in the US. A lot of work is still left to be done.

Even though the PDI has stagnated, SpotCrime continues to pursue police open data efforts on our own. SpotCrime is still focusing on getting police agencies to report crime activity openly on a daily basis and implore an ‘open data for all’ approach. We are asking for any barriers to access, like vendor restrictions and FOIA, to be removed and for police data to be democratized.

So ask yourself - is my police agency releasing these datasets openly? Why are these datasets useful? How can we perpetuate the democratization of this data to make the criminal justice system fair for every human being, no matter of race, gender, or socioeconomic background.

If you’d like to learn more about police data transparency across the US, specifically in regards to RMS and CAD data, please reach out to us - feedback@spotcrime.com.