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

Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by xenadu02 on Monday September 19, 2022 @10:13PM (#32906844)

You might try defining what the "ideal" department's data would look like: what categories of data, what columns each record has, what the values are for each, etc. Ideally you'd stamp it with a year and give it a spiffy name so it could be the National Police Data Reporting Standard 2022 (NPDRS.2022) or something.

Departments that are trying to be transparent (or who just don't want to deal with figuring it all out from scratch) may be happy to adopt something considered a "standard" for tracking and reporting data. In some cases it means it is a checkbox they can check without having to deal with annoying people and their annoying questions... but that hardly matters so long as the data is made available. It would also give companies developing software for police departments a target to aim for.

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Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by oftenwrong on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @04:17PM (#32917216)

Working forwards like this is definitely the right solution if it's achievable. I have worked with some government and police datasets, and they reflect that the records-keeping approach is very much designed with the old-world use case of manually reviewing individual records. For example, a record of a traffic collision would be perfectly fine if you wanted to go back see what happened in a specific collision. However, if you wanted to run an analysis over a set of collision records, you would run into problems like vehicle types being specified as 'free text' (anything can be entered), with no standard set of vehicle classifications (like an enumeration).

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Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by josh-pdap on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @08:52PM (#32919731)

“working forwards” is a good phrase. Thanks for this whole comment!

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Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by josh-pdap on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @04:22PM (#32917281)

Yes, I've linked to it other places on the page but Measures for Justice is doing that. https://measuresforjustice.org/infrastructure

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Re:I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police b... by brimwats on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @10:42AM (#32912307)

this is a great idea. activists could then use the ideal standard & pressure departments into achieving "NPDRS Transparency" or something

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