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I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
51–60 of 202 posts
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#52Is their any data sources we could scrape to stop crimes in our neighborhoods so the police don't have any reason to come around and cause problems?
https://raheem.ai/ is an interesting project. One idea someone in one of their community calls had was scraping dispatch data to figure out where social services might be useful, and they're creating a dispatch app which lets people ask for non-police help.
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could scrape improved social safety nets, better access to birth control, and taxing the rich to pay for it.
How could we use that data to help prevent crime? To best mimic the success of the original post, it would be good to be able to identify people doing the most damage to a neighborhood so we could help them first with tax relief, food, birth control, whatever would help the most.
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Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#54I like writing web scrapers and this is an interesting project idea. If I understand right you are looking for volunteers to write scrapers that would take a police department, scrape the PD website, and download any PDFs or documents that gather data about the police department. Is that right? If so, I feel that's not super clearly communicated - I had to look at a couple example scrapers before arriving at this gue…
1. I replied to the parent comment here; our answer to the scale problem is to recognize that people doing web scraping are as decentralized as the police. Our goal is to empower people who have questions about the police to answer them.
2. You can run them locally. We're not running the scrapers anywhere, or storing extractions anywhere.
3. This is a big, big question. Right now, the answer is dependent on the use case. Rather than trying to make the world's biggest database, we're going to respond to community needs and build this kind of thing as it comes up.
4. https://measuresforjustice.org/ is doing something like this! We're interested in creating incentives for police departments to make their data more accessible and transparent.
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#55a while back I created www.bartcrimes.com to publish police reports which were intentionally hidden behind a mailing list you must get approved to be a member of. Turns out, the public loves this kind of thing.
I love that you wrote it on BART. I spent my year of BART time solving chess puzzles.
"Making public information public" is a good tagline too.
Do you know what kinds of work people did with the data? It seems to me one of the best ways to address BART crime would be to support the impoverished and desperate people who don't have any recovery or mental health support, but that work is slow...
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#56Is it possible to see the data the PDAP has scraped? I visited the website but I don't see any actual data.
We don't have any scraped data yet. I replied to the parent post addressing some of this, but mostly if people need the data they run a scraper locally and use the data that way. At the moment, our energy is going into building an app to help people submit and manage our database of data sources: https://docs.pdap.io/activities/data-sources/what-is-a-data-...
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#57Hello! I'm the executive director. I have a design background, have done product management in the past, and aside from keeping the lights on at PDAP and making sure we're tax-compliant I am in a product role. I talk to people using police data, and figure out where we can add value to make the data more accessible. TL:DR; If you want to write scrapers: go for it! Run your scraper, share the results in Discord and wi…
Not sure why this got killed (dead in HN terms) but I vouched for it.
What do you mean? I can still see it, but you can't?
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#58Thank you for your work with this! One question I have: You say in your FAQ "We aren't a watchdog—our activism is data collection and accessibility, not analysis or research." Can you note any instances of other people using your data for analysis or research?
We're still developing those relationships, and we haven't generated any novel data that is deeper than web URLs. I'm based in Pittsburgh so we're still working with local journalists, activists, etc. to understand how they use the data and how we can help.
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#59Hello! I'm the executive director. I have a design background, have done product management in the past, and aside from keeping the lights on at PDAP and making sure we're tax-compliant I am in a product role. I talk to people using police data, and figure out where we can add value to make the data more accessible. TL:DR; If you want to write scrapers: go for it! Run your scraper, share the results in Discord and wi…
Not sure why this got killed (dead in HN terms) but I vouched for it.
Yeah, all of the new comments from the account are dead. I think creating a new account, posting an article, and posting a handful of comments looks a lot like spam to HN. I've vouched for the comments, but would definitely recommend emailing the admins.
Josh, I can't reply to you directly, but yeah... you can see the comments, but most people can't, unless they have enabled "showdead" in their preferences.
Re: I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data
#60Hello! I'm the executive director. I have a design background, have done product management in the past, and aside from keeping the lights on at PDAP and making sure we're tax-compliant I am in a product role. I talk to people using police data, and figure out where we can add value to make the data more accessible. TL:DR; If you want to write scrapers: go for it! Run your scraper, share the results in Discord and wi…
Not sure why this got killed (dead in HN terms) but I vouched for it.
Thank you.