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

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

#181

Post by Mandatum »

liamtuohyff wrote: post #180

I was an early helper when I saw that on reddit and joined your slack before you had a discord. I was also one of the ones you mentioned that fizzled out after the initial excitement died down. But I didn't stop helping because the excitement died down. I stopped helping because I felt like we weren't "doing" anything. Other than raising money and getting paperwork in order. Have you guys actually "done" anything in…

This boils down to why most NFP's fizzle out. They're usually used by founders and participants as a launchpad for careers or companies.

Glad I saw this.

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

#182

Post by snapplebobapple »

pstuart wrote: post #170
snapplebobapple wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis. There are tons of examples. People killed by drunk drivers, pedestrian road deaths, illegal drug usage in society, etc. Innocent people killed by cops is a bad measure because, by definition, pretty much all the people cops kill are innocent because almost all of them have not been found guilty by a jury of their peers f…

> That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis Maybe your writing was not clear enough, m'kay? And now you play word games with my intent. I did not advocate for extreme measures -- simply to have clear targets of and rules of engagement; to identify workable solutions.

No, I am telling you what the problem is with having the rate set at zero, which is what I have been doing the entire time. Using your terminology, you don't get extreme measures initially, you walk yourself to extreme measures because everything you change does not hit your goal rather than just calling it a day when you hit the inflection point where the costs of your policy are roughly equal to the benefits of your policy and there are no obviously better uses of your limited resources that you should be doing instead.

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

#183

Post by josh-pdap »

liamtuohyff wrote: post #180

I was an early helper when I saw that on reddit and joined your slack before you had a discord. I was also one of the ones you mentioned that fizzled out after the initial excitement died down. But I didn't stop helping because the excitement died down. I stopped helping because I felt like we weren't "doing" anything. Other than raising money and getting paperwork in order. Have you guys actually "done" anything in…

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 flurry of conversation. I empathize with the people trying to keep everyone focused in those days. It was like trying to have a 2500 person web scraping flashmob with nothing planned in advance. However, all that conversation was important. We still benefit from the combined relevant experience of those 2500 passionate people.

I took a step back from the project for a few months, not having time to volunteer. My understanding is that the board was basically formed out of all the people remaining after some enthusiasm died down.

When I came back, the board had incorporated and applied for 501c3 status. There were four board members, and a few volunteers who mostly just helped talk through the massive problem and plan. Eventually Kristin (OP) stepped down from the board, but was still at some meetings. A rotating cast of 2-3 other people would be hanging around the meetings at any given time.

I became Director of Operations on a volunteer basis for a bit over a year. This mostly just means paying bills, knowing passwords, and updating the website.

We had weekly meetings, where we'd talk for a few minutes or hours about the project, our ideas, and what we could do to move things forward. [0]

We ran a data bounty during this time [1]. One volunteer, Eric, made a bunch of prototypes around metadata for data sources.

Then we got 501c3 status after waiting for almost a year. I quit my day job and started writing grants and set up online donations. I hired two contractors for a bit of grant writing help, but otherwise did not have "coworkers" or "co-volunteers".

We got the grant money [2] about 8 months later. I went looking for a full-time software engineer. I started getting a salary and working full-time on the project as Executive Director, doing all the non-technical design, planning, and product work.

Throughout, I spent a lot of time interviewing and doing design research: investigating the work being done journalists, transparency activists, and local data users in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere). I've also been collecting feedback and experience from everyone in the Discord. Most of our current ideas about what's important and where to start come from that work, and the recent addition of an engineer with excellent journalism and software experience (about 6 weeks ago) has allowed us to start prototyping and developing something together in earnest.

Now: We're excited about our strategies, and it's probably a little early for broad consumption. We didn't coordinate this post; everything you can see is a work in progress. There's lively discussion in Discord about our goals, and I've been typing for about 24 hours straight with a break to nap and a break to eat something.

[0]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/working-sessions [1]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/blog/7-14-21-bounty-retro [2]: https://docs.pdap.io/updates/blog/5-17-22-first-grant-awarde...

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

#184

Post by pstuart »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #182
pstuart wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That you think it makes no sense means you do not understand statistics or cost/benefit analysis Maybe your writing was not clear enough, m'kay? And now you play word games with my intent. I did not advocate for extreme measures -- simply to have clear targets of and rules of engagement; to identify workable solutions.

No, I am telling you what the problem is with having the rate set at zero, which is what I have been doing the entire time. Using your terminology, you don't get extreme measures initially, you walk yourself to extreme measures because everything you change does not hit your goal rather than just calling it a day when you hit the inflection point where the costs of your policy are roughly equal to the benefits of you…

I don't think you're willfully misconstruing me, but you are nonetheless.

You're manufacturing slippery slope reductions of a concept and therefore dismissing the concept.

What should the goal of police departments of pet dogs killed by cops? Should they aim for 10,000? A million? Just a handful? A logical answer is "we want to avoid killing any pet dogs in the course of service" (also known as zero).

Now they could take absurd actions to avoid that (leaving the scene whenever a dog is present), or they could add that to standardized training so that they're better prepared to deal with that situation.

So without providing real-world examples of you concerns you are just offering up florid conjecture.

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

#185

Post by josh-pdap »

oftenwrong wrote: post #175
xenadu02 wrote: post #120

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…

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. Howe…

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

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

#187

Post by sbierwagen »

jen20 wrote: post #166
sbierwagen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PoliceActivity youtube channel is interesting for this. https://www.youtube.com/c/PoliceActivity/videos (For most of the videos, which show people dying, you must be logged into a youtube account to pass the "violent content" prompt) Maybe 9 out of 10 videos are "good kills". Officer says something like "hey, stop committing a crime", the suspect says something along the lines of "fuck you pig!", pulls a gun, and…

> They don't want the rate to be low, they want it to be zero As someone that cannot even vote in the US (and is therefore neither red nor blue) - that seems _eminently fucking reasonable_. This kind of thing just does not happen in the UK. I'd wager there have been fewer police killings (let along just shootings) in the past two decades in the UK than just this weekend in the US. For anyone that actually believes in…

>This kind of thing just does not happen in the UK.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/chris-kaba-p...

>Chris Kaba: Protests held across UK after unarmed black man shot dead by police. Crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators brandished ‘fight racism’ signs following the death of unarmed 24-year-old

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

#188

Post by joshenders »

pennaMan wrote: post #179
joshenders wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, maybe you should read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html before trying to dox “hypocritical” witches.

Maybe you should read this, I was not talking about your keybase account :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32903946

While I appreciate web3 brainrot backpedaling, I don’t see how this is related to explicit rule violation of this site of personal attacks.

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

#189

Post by pennaMan »

joshenders wrote: post #188
pennaMan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should read this, I was not talking about your keybase account :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32903946

While I appreciate web3 brainrot backpedaling, I don’t see how this is related to explicit rule violation of this site of personal attacks.

>Take your pathetic crypto grift elsewhere please.

Triple down on the hypocrisy, now that's impressive!

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

#190

Post by josh-pdap »

josh-pdap wrote: post #183
liamtuohyff wrote: post #180

I was an early helper when I saw that on reddit and joined your slack before you had a discord. I was also one of the ones you mentioned that fizzled out after the initial excitement died down. But I didn't stop helping because the excitement died down. I stopped helping because I felt like we weren't "doing" anything. Other than raising money and getting paperwork in order. Have you guys actually "done" anything in…

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 flurry of conversation. I empathize with the people trying to keep everyone focused in those days. It was like trying to have a 2500 person web scraping flashmob with nothing planned in advance. However, all that conversation was important. We s…

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 respond if something came up, but there were many working sessions in a row where I was the only one to show up.
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