[sudo-discuss] OPD data

[Rachelle Annechino]

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!
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