The Undue Influence of Police Technology Companies on Open Crime Data

Police budgets are used not only to hire officers, but also to purchase tech from companies to aid in police work. Anything from body cams to surveillance tech to in-car computers to RMS/CAD systems are typically hired out to a private vendor company rather than created and maintained in house by the police departments themselves.

We came across a paper by Elizabeth E Joh published at the NYU School Law Review titled ’The Undue Influence of Surveillance Technology Companies on Policing’. Joh specifically focused on the influence surveillance companies have over police departments which adversely affects policing leaving consequences for civil liberties and police oversight. This same concept can be applied to police vendors hired to house police data in Records Management System (RMS) and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems.

These vendor systems are in charge of a trough of public data - from arrest records to body cam footage to crime blotters to use of force to police reports.

The ongoing conversations surrounding police reform revolve around the kind of data that should be readily available from police agencies - a crime blotter, use of force data, arrest data, among others. A recent Arnold Ventures report noted that effective police reform relies on gathering data in order to effectively assess the criminal justice system and support reforms and restore public trust.

Unfortunately, the private vendor databases utilized by police agencies to house this data have fallen incredibly short.

The recent merger of large RMS/CAD and crime mapping vendors has left a few companies with major decision making powers on how police database systems are set up, maintained, and made publicly accessible. This level of control that a few RMS/CAD vendors are allowed to have presents a level of undue influence over access to public information.

EXAMPLES OF UNDUE INFLUENCE

Less competition in the RMS/CAD database market would leave the assumption that data could be organized across jurisdictional boundaries using the same RMS/CAD vendor but that is not the case.

Instead, the lack of competition has led to little innovation and poor product design, making it harder for the police and public to tap into police databases. Police agencies are left with a set of predetermined reports that do not embrace 21st century policing. And, their hands tied as a vendor has the ability to charge extra for access to any new report that does not come stock. When Box Elder County Sheriff’s Office asked for a new report, their vendor quoted $100/hour and the report would take approximately 24-48 hours to create.

It would be no surprise to learn then that the FBI transition from UCR SRS to NIBRS began in 2015 and with a deadline of Jan 1, 2021 and as of October 31, 2020, only 8,742 law enforcement agencies, representing 48.9% of the population, were reporting NIBRS data to the UCR program. RMS/CAD vendors did not help agencies with this transition deadline perhaps because the agencies do not have a budget to pay.

In 2014 the FBI began collecting use of force data, but it is estimated that 40% of police agencies are still not sharing this data. In 2015 the White House Police Data Initiative launched, encouraging the open release of crime data for anyone to access, use, and reshare - yet there are still thousands of police departments not sharing any data openly.

Although a lot of the largest RMS/CAD vendors publish crime data via a crime mapping product, all three of the largest crime mapping companies have placed a terms of use on the public data displayed on their website and removed any ability to download the data - restricting the public and press from copying down and re-sharing the information.

Recently, Chatham County, GA police department responded to a FOIA request by pointing the requester to a third party vendor. The requester pointed out to Chatham County that the data from the vendor’s website can not be downloaded, and subsequently requested the data directly from the police department. Chatham County’s response was ‘I do not believe the data is able to be downloaded from the site, only viewed. Unfortunately, I do not have the ability to provide the data directly.’

The vendors sometimes sell their products with the promise of police transparency, but come up short. In 2016, one major vendor partnered with an open data company to unprecedentedly publish an open API that shared crime data from hundreds of police agencies with the public. In 2019, that vendor turned off access to the public feed because they saw the open data company's new parent company as a competitor. A vendor single handedly stifled public access to crime information with the flip of a switch.

Some police agencies look to vendors to promote ‘transparency’, while stifling open data. There has been a recent increase in police agencies utilizing ‘transparency dashboards’ that provide no real way to download the raw public data. The vendor attaches a hefty ‘licensing fee’ to allow data from their dashboard to be downloaded by police agencies and the public. This is not open data nor an accurate use of the word transparency.

Even smaller scale RMS/CAD vendors have directly impeded access to crime data. In 2020 Harrisburg, PA moved to a new vendor system and stopped providing their crime log that they had been supplying for over 10 years. The city’s reasoning for no longer sending out the data was because they changed RMS/CAD vendors and the previous report being requested was no longer available. The data had not disappeared, just the specific name of the report being requested was no longer in existence. We appealed this decision, as SpotCrime was only seeking data from the database. We won the appeal. If you are looking for crime data in Harrisburg, check out the Right To Know ruling on the appeal here.

Finally, regionally run in-house CAD/RMS systems spare no change in upcharging the police departments they serve in order to allow the public to download the data. An estimate of $24,674.26 was given to one Sheriff’s office by their quasi-government run regional CAD/RMS in Michigan, called CLEMIS, in order to pull a calls for service file. This outrageous quote was given even though CLEMIS already has the coding in place to make the data available for other agencies it serves, like Ann Arbor. (SpotCrime did eventually gain access to the file, and has asked Oakland County to publish this file directly to their website for anyone to access, download, use, and reshare. At the time of publication of this blog post the download button was working, but Oakland County said they would only publish via PDF even though the file's original format is machine readable).

Allowing a vendor to have this level of access and decision making power behind sharing public information has led to less transparency. Restricting the use of public information stifles transparency and leaves the public and press in the dark. Without access to data, the public and government can not make useful data driven decisions. By hindering access to the data, not innovating, or overcharging for reports, vendors have single handedly stymied the ability for the government to operate efficiently.

MINIMIZING UNDUE INFLUENCE

When it comes to police data there needs to be standards in place and applied to any kind of tech that a police agency uses. It should be the responsibility of an RMS/CAD vendor to make sure police agencies and the public have unfettered access to public information held in databases. Public records laws need the ability to enforce transparency of private vendor companies that are contracted to house public information. Finally, agencies must embrace data, tech, and transparency and advocate their tech vendors to embrace transparency as well.