[sudo-discuss] OPD data

Hi sudo-discuss, I've been doing some poking around looking into police accountability in the US... seems like one major stumbling block is a lack of public access to police data. Here in Oakland, it looks like OPD has a ton of data on use of force and complaints that could be de-identified and made available to the public, used in data visualizations, etc. -- but isn't. (Not that OPD's data should be the only data source in investigating accountability, but I figure it's a start. Also it looks like *some* of this data is available, but it's a super limited subset + kind of all over the place) Recently I requested some data through RecordTrac <http://records.oaklandnet.com>, chatted with the public records request coordinator... just kind of curious about what would happen and how it worked. A lot of the OPD requests I saw on RecordTrac received PDF documents as responses -- but OPD is entering this stuff electronically AFAIK; you'd think a structured dataset would be easier to produce if anything. Anyway, I'm wondering if other people on this list are interested in this stuff, have suggestions, thoughts, etc. It seems like there should be a coordinated effort out there working on work on this, but I haven't found one (?) Thanks!