81–90 of 202 posts
This is important. Locally, we had a sheriff who was being heavily, heavily criticized due to several deaths at the county facility. This was at the height of the protests a few years ago. It was a lot of work to find data on policing nationwide, because the question really was "Is the sheriff doing a bad job, or do bad things happen sometimes?" After some hard work trying to identify other cities with similar socioe…
Maintaining scrapers for 18k county websites and PDs is no small task and looking through the docs for PDAP, it seems like this is still a very open question.
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Not sure why this got killed (dead in HN terms) but I vouched for it.
Over half this person's comments (the Josh-pdap person I mean) have been flagged. Not sure if this is some false positive on anti-spam (new account, lots of comments in a short time on a single story) or if it's someone with a vendetta. @dang this is a little weird... (I know, this site doesn't have magic @, but also i think the site moderator probably has scripts searching for mentions/summons anyway. I would anyway…
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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
* especially against a new user—greeting newcomers with a torrent of abuse is really bad
Here’s the pitfalls I see you falling into:
(1) seriously, what data are you collecting? “Everything” isn’t a great answer (who’s supposed to use ‘everything’, anyway? “Anyone”?). “Apples-to-apples police misconduct statistics” is a good one.
(2) it’s important to clarify 1 because you need to know who you’re serving, and why. Different activists need different data. “Have all data” sounds good until you need to decide how to allocate your resources.
(3) more deeply, data is the land of edge cases. Even just with police misconduct, you need to get DEEP to rigorously compare seemingly-simple stats like “# of unjustified police killings”. If you don’t start narrow, you’ll never show value. If you don’t show value, nobody will ever care you exist.
When I look at the data you’ve collected, it ranges from annual reports, to municipal contact info, to crime stats. What’s important to collect at scale? To whom? What do they need it for?
Again - great, ambitious idea! But $250k goes fast. Show value before it runs out!
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As a long time scanner enthusiast, if you actually spend anytime listening to PD radios (which is legal and easy), you will be disappointed with how little information actually goes out over the unencrypted air - just enough to get units rolling, after that, very little, for obvious reasons.
Because cops are lazy and want to put it all in a report later? I would.
Then there's email and other messaging for lower priority things, and phone calls for stuff that is sensitive.
Apologies for my ignorance but how is this going to police the police? I read the original blog post, there was lots of inferences/could and might be's/etc made but little in the way of proof of anything. What's to stop the police saying it was just circumstance that provided your results? I'm not here defending the police, or denigrating the project, just playing devils advocate. What happens if the police just igno…
Maintaining thousands of scrapers for different formats seems like a nightmare, and it won't take long for departments to learn they can slightly tweak the format of their reporting to cause extra work for you.
On the plus side, working with all this data probably makes you all very qualified to advise on developing standards.
Is it possible to see the data the PDAP has scraped? I visited the website but I don't see any actual data.
https://docs.pdap.io/activities/data-sources/explore-data-so... It's in the docs.
What would be an example of a core data set they are trying to compile? police involved shootings? police budgets? everything.