Viewing profile — josh-pdap

Clarifying: when I said "otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers" I mean only for a period of a few months. There have almost always been people in the Discord to resp…

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

I can only give my perspective on the project: I showed up when PDAP had 2,500 members in Slack, right after Kristin made her original case study and Reddit post. There was a flurr…

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

Yep, almost all the data is useful for one reason or another. The point is to paint a picture of police activity in general.

The FBI and other police organizations are certainly interested in using police data to make the job as safe as possible, for the police as well as the people they’re sworn to prot…

Thanks for all this. Articulating why it’s important in a few words is incredibly difficult and something we’re always working on. The bottom line is that we believe public informa…

Interesting, what are you using them for? Most of our scrapers are written by inexperienced volunteers so this is probably still quite valuable as is. If it works, we’ll take it. Y…

Yes! Police, jails, and courts. Those are all under the umbrella of criminal justice data, and all contextualize each other. Could you share what you’ve made somehow? josh.chamberl…

We definitely want scrapers to be maintained as-needed, as opposed to trying to spin all the plates. It’d be thousands of thousands. Measures for Justice is working on developing s…

We do want to be careful with PII. We don’t want to make a big table of PII, although tables of PII are regularly published to government websites as html tables. Yet another reaso…

I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me. As a non-engineer I think I’m following you. When you say “I know what those people are capable of” do you mean something as…

Thanks for wanting to help! If you go to https://docs.pdap.io you should be able to find out how to contribute Data Sources. No coding required. Holler in Discord or email me (josh…

In our case it’s about working with local activists and journalists. Police are decentralized; each department acts independently, for the most part. Most people using the data see…

I will say that we are not wading into this. We focus on accessibility; if you point to a big pile of ugly data, the first thing that will happen is that a bunch of very smart peop…

I’m not aware of one. Tracking people is hard because names aren’t unique; it’s a challenge tracking officers as they move between departments, too.

Your question makes sense. I’ve addressed this elsewhere but I’m currently just answering on my phone so I’ll summarize by saying that our focus is on complete, solid local data on…

We’ve looked at this and it’s pretty exciting! Have you used it? Know of any particularly relevant case studies we should look at?

Tougher to answer, but maybe more useful, would be “What harm reduction strategies are being tried in other cities? Are they working?” this is at the intersection of policy and out…

Thanks for the thoughtful response! This is really helpful. 1. Agreed. Our strategy for this isn’t clear on the website, I guess, but we do have one. It’s to focus on depth in geog…

Thanks! I contacted them and I've been reinstated.

Can you say more about this? Feel free to reach out to my email (josh.chamberlain@pdap.io) if you'd like to share more. It sounds like you have some expertise that would be incredi…

Aren't forums like this for devil's advocating, like, almost exclusively? Working as expected! We've come a long way since that post in terms of strategy and focus. Most of that ti…

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…

Thanks! It wasn't me who posted the article, but I agree with the theory that it's likely some well-meaning "new account spam prevention" thing.