I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data

Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by ALittleLight on Monday September 19, 2022 @06:15PM (#32904861)

Not to be too rude/negative/mean - but it seems like a big concern to me that a "police data" project that's existed for three years, has a couple employees, has some funding, etc - doesn't really seem to have any police data. If I wanted to write a scraper to gather documents off of police websites and run it by myself and store my results locally - I could. What does your project add?

What I would expect to see is something like:

1. Here's what data we want from each police department each day. Here's what value you should use to indicate that data is not available.

2. Here's a list of police departments. Write a scraper. If it passes tests to show it's generating valid data, and code review, we will run the scraper in a daily basis storing the output in this database.

3. Here's how you can query our database.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by josh-pdap on Monday September 19, 2022 @06:22PM (#32904926)

It's ok, this feedback is how we understand what our work looks like to other people, and how we improve!

We've only had paid staff for about 6 weeks. We've run several experiments and started from scratch a few times over the years. We've been slowly inching the project forward in our spare time; I was the only volunteer for much of that time, and I can't even code!

1. Sounds great, we're building something like this.

2. Even making a list of police departments is a big challenge. We've made a good start but have work to do.

3. Yep, soon we'll have something to query.

[ Parent | on HN ]