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 ...