I can see why others would disagree with me here, but I personally see no difference between having party affiliation and having 50% of your relevant volunteers doing work that helps a politician achieve their goals.
I can take a stab at it, there are potentially political motives to why a politician might want data that would bolster the perception of police misconduct.
As far as I can tell, you're being intentionally uncharitable. There's a difference between doing work in isolation that a politician uses for their own political goals and doing work that specifically and intentionally helps a politician on their request.
If you were to drop all of your ongoing side projects to work with a political candidate that asked for your help, would you really try to argue that you're not at least somewhat tied to that candidate?
> If you were to drop all of your ongoing side projects to work with a political candidate that asked for your help, would you really try to argue that you're not at least somewhat tied to that candidate?
Not if they were willing to do so regardless of the candidate's party or political agenda.
> As far as I can tell, you're being intentionally uncharitable.
I just don’t see how the posted ticket supports your claim. So far it seems like innuendo rather than evidence.
> If you were to drop all of your ongoing side projects to work with a political candidate that asked for your help, would you really try to argue that you're not at least somewhat tied to that candidate?
Yes, but that’s not what is happening here.
They aren’t working with anyone, and providing data on NJ is as much a primary goal of their project as providing data on CA.
It is possible that they have a party affiliation or bias but responding to a publicly visible data request from a candidate doesn’t seem to provide any evidence for that.
"Working with" feels like a loaded phrase. Someone created that ticket requesting that data 14 minutes ago, and the ticket has yet to even be assigned to anyone (at the time of my post). I'm not sure how you can conflate this project's lack of a response to a request as "already working with".
"most comprehensive" is different from comprehensive. Curious, I went to take a look. The latest set of data was release November 2018 and covered the years 2012-2016 purchasable for $200.
Just to clarify, The Force Report was the result of over a year of work by journalists that had to fight tooth and nail for every FOIA request and they freely acknowledge it is imperfect. To me at least it is something our government should be already doing.
An issue I see is that the public data police departments put out is often only what they choose to, meaning any analysis of that data is potentially biased to an unknown degree. I suppose adding FOIA data into the mix could improve that, but doesn’t sound easy since those are usually delivered as PDFs.
I think this "the dog that didn't bark" phenomenon may be a much more important phenomenon than meets the eye. People's perception of the world is a function of their observations of reality - for starters, the vast majority of people don't even have any exposure to things like police data (other than the typically misleading narratives that they might encounter in the news), but then even the small majority of people who do dig deeper into the details, these people too will leave with a distorted perception of reality if only a subset of the data is revealed, and they do not know that it is only a subset.
The end result of all of this complexity is that people think the world is one way, but it is actually another, and the vastness of the gap between the two could be anywhere from small and insignificant, to gigantic and crucially significant, if one applies this idea to not just police data, but everything (the entirety of reality is subject to this flaw, and many others that we do not realize).
Add the fact that even the businessmen and regulators, influential people, politicians and judges, they all build their image of the world mostly on the same sources as everyone else - and it's becoming worryingly apparent that all the control systems in societies are operating with very low visibility into the things they're controlling.
Imagine a PID controller keeping a boiler from overheating. Now imagine the temperature input to that controller is a thermometer mounted to the door of a metal cabinet next to the boiler, and thus it reports anything related to the boiler temperature only when somebody is looking for something in that cabinet (when the opened metal doors touch the boiler and conduct heat). Doesn't sound like a good control system.
Is this an American project that sources & aggregates data from American police forces, or is it some general thing that wants to draw from multiple countries? (Because the site doesn't mention anything about locale).
I thought the same, but there are apparently 17,985 police forces in USA[1] so it looks to be American centric. I think they should list this in their FAQ or make it more obvious.
The police force is losing much of its ability to enforce the law. Young casual political observers praise this but we’ve already seen this happen in the 1960s and then culminate in Bernhard Goetz once everyone was fed up with drugged low-lifes bringing down the quality of life of otherwise hard-working individuals.
The reduction of quality of life is already happening in permissive cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle. Public spaces are taken over by those breaking the law, and yes that very often includes “drugged low-lifes”, and it brings a host of other problems with it. As examples: a popular jogging path near me is now being avoided by women I know because men from the encampments that have taken over the park the path runs through, and sexually harass them sometimes. There are frequent posts on Next Door where some homeless person will be on camera stealing things out of peoples porches or yards, to feed their lifestyle, and police simply don’t have the resources to solve those crimes and deter further criminal acts. Graffiti and littering have increased substantially, despite littering in green spaces carrying a big fine for any law abiding citizens. Criminals that are arrested are mostly simply released in the spirit of restorative justice or similar policies, going on to repeat the same crimes against new victims.
This last year has involved a lot of blind hatred of policing and poorly thought out calls to reduce police funding all based on very rare anecdotal incidents which have been spun as data. The reality is that police forces in America have hundreds of millions of interactions with citizens and almost none of them are problematic. It do surprise that surveys show public perceptions of police brutality are incredibly skewed, far from resort (https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/cases-of-police-brutality-agai...).
I can only describe the current trend as a mass hysteria driven by biased news media and dedicated true believers, who organize on social media and real life, and end up influencing the masses into believing the same things.
As is well known, crime follows economic poverty, not the other way around. Do you think that this is more about the massive economic downturn we are experiencing, rather than police getting their massive budgets trimmed a bit?
It’s been an issue in Seattle and these other cities well before COVID, so my instinct is it doesn’t have to do with economic downturns. These cities had strong economies for the last decade but my take is that their permissive criminal justice policies induced a large population of drug addicted vagrants and other homeless cohorts to migrate here, since they know they’ll be left alone to do whatever they want. Thus far the city has not even collected strong data on who the homeless are and where they come from, and instead they tout self reported data from an annual “point in time” survey. Homeless advocacy groups coach survey respondents to claim they are from here so that they’ll garner more sympathy and political support. It’s hard to characterize the problem in provable ways when the authorities are not interested in the truth.
As for policing: Seattle’s police force was too small even before the calls for defunding. It severely lagged the median police officer counts among cities in America. That, combined with an ideologically driven city attorney’s office, has led to a revolving door of criminals that signals to other criminals that they’ll face no consequences for their actions. That in turn has induced more and more criminality.
> This last year has involved a lot of blind hatred of policing and poorly thought out calls to reduce police funding all based on very rare anecdotal incidents which have been spun as data.
This is interesting, because the evidence for your claim is anecdotes and “posts on NextDoor” — what statistical evidence do you have that crime is increasing more in “more permissive” cities vs “less permissive” ones? I would also invite you to consider that COVID may have more to do with this than anything else.
I also invite you to consider people who commit crimes as human beings with needs like you and I — needs that are often unmet: housing, healthcare, community, and which are not resolved by locking them up.
I don’t have broad statistical evidence on this at this moment, but this has been an issue well before COVID. I was able to find a past article highlighting data about crime following homeless accommodations in a particular neighborhood in Seattle (https://www.q13fox.com/news/crime-rate-rose-103-in-a-two-cit...). Business associations in Seattle have also published reports with data about these issues for several years as well, and numerous articles have been written about it (example https://www.seattlebusinessmag.com/tourismhospitality/downto...). You might be able to dig up more and find the actual reports with some dedicated Googling.
But regardless, truth starts with observations and anecdotes. In Seattle, reliable data measuring crime is hard to come by since people have become jaded and simply don’t report crime any longer. The police are understaffed (well below median police officers per capita in the country) and are directed by city leadership to deprioritize such investigations, so residents don’t see a benefit from reporting. I’ll admit I am part of the problem - the other day I saw a homeless person expose herself in front of children and I didn’t bother reporting it to any authority because nothing will be done and I am just exhausted by all of it. The only time residents bother is if they are victims of property crime that is large enough to make the insurance deductible worth it.
In the case of police shooting unarmed blacks, we already have the data. The Washington Post has maintained these records (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...). It gives us a clear sense of the magnitude of the issue at hand. This is also why surveys are able to say that people overestimate the frequency of police brutality.
> I also invite you to consider people who commit crimes as human beings with needs like you and I — needs that are often unmet
They are free to meet those needs the way anyone else does, by showing personal responsibility for their life choices. I have little sympathy for those who decide to live a drug centric lifestyle. And likewise, people shouldn’t move to a desirable, expensive location unless they have a plan on how to make it work. Existing residents should not have to subsidize either group, with their money or by giving up their quality of life.
> They are free to meet those needs the way anyone else does, by showing personal responsibility for their life choices. I have little sympathy for those who decide to live a drug centric lifestyle. And likewise, people shouldn’t move to a desirable, expensive location unless they have a plan on how to make it work. Existing residents should not have to subsidize either group, with their money or by giving up their quality of life.
This group seems to have turned into a group that's only interested in scraping "criminal records" and "court records" over police accountability records, and believes that cop names should be removed from scraped records. They've also openly discussed inviting cops and FBI employees into their slack to discuss scraping. Consider that "Police Data Accessibility Project" is another way of saying "We only make available data that the police want us to make available.".
The project itself has tons of managerial types (who happily put PDAP on their linkedin pages..) trying to manage the 2,500 people who have joined their slack, however only a small number of contributors are actually working on scrapers (~2), who like I said -- are focusing on "criminal" datasets and not datasets around accountability. In doing so, they're effectively ignoring the core of the data that exists to aid in police accountability, eg complaints and misconduct records themselves. This shouldn't be a surprise, since police agencies tend NOT to provide information online that could be used against them in court, and they WILL fight to the teeth to prevent the release of damning records. Souce: I spend a lot of time with FOIA trying to get misconduct records..
The group's foundation is also shaky. The group was started by owners of a marketing company, frac.tl that specializes in exploiting emotions to turn something viral, which on its own should raise flags. The blog post that "started" their supposed movement has three listed writers over the course of several months [1][2][3]. The data from this blog post (afaict the only dataset actually released that's tied to this project) was found to contain private information and had to be cleaned up - 6mo after it was pushed onto github and forked many times.
If you are looking for a group to support, please consider either volunteering with or donating to local police accountability groups. Your time/donations would be much better served with them.
It really would be nice if we could get some legally-recognized standards for data schemas and interfaces so projects like this wouldn't be so necessary. But I have absolutely no idea if there's any precedent for that or how we'd get there.
39 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 86.6 ms ] threadNo. Our only motivation is to provide trusted data in an age of disinformation.”
If true, this is an awesome project.
https://pdap.atlassian.net/browse/PDAP-149
“Any chance you guys have data on NJ? I'm running for office there and was looking to get some police misconduct data to double check a couple things”
It is not clear how this means that they are working with a political candidate, or what that means to you.
Can you explain what conclusions you are drawing from this message?
One of two of their volunteer scrapers said that he would drop his work in California to work on New Jersey instead.
I guess "working with" is bad language, though "interested in dropping other work in favor of requests by political candidates" is more accurate.
It’s not clear to me how you think this relates to their claim: “Are you affiliated with a political party or have a political agenda?“
I don’t see how this has anything to do with party affiliation. Can you explain how it does?
If you were to drop all of your ongoing side projects to work with a political candidate that asked for your help, would you really try to argue that you're not at least somewhat tied to that candidate?
Not if they were willing to do so regardless of the candidate's party or political agenda.
I just don’t see how the posted ticket supports your claim. So far it seems like innuendo rather than evidence.
> If you were to drop all of your ongoing side projects to work with a political candidate that asked for your help, would you really try to argue that you're not at least somewhat tied to that candidate?
Yes, but that’s not what is happening here.
They aren’t working with anyone, and providing data on NJ is as much a primary goal of their project as providing data on CA.
It is possible that they have a party affiliation or bias but responding to a publicly visible data request from a candidate doesn’t seem to provide any evidence for that.
It wouldn’t solve the problem but it would allow the bias to be visible.
The end result of all of this complexity is that people think the world is one way, but it is actually another, and the vastness of the gap between the two could be anywhere from small and insignificant, to gigantic and crucially significant, if one applies this idea to not just police data, but everything (the entirety of reality is subject to this flaw, and many others that we do not realize).
Imagine a PID controller keeping a boiler from overheating. Now imagine the temperature input to that controller is a thermometer mounted to the door of a metal cabinet next to the boiler, and thus it reports anything related to the boiler temperature only when somebody is looking for something in that cabinet (when the opened metal doors touch the boiler and conduct heat). Doesn't sound like a good control system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_...
There must surely be a middle road here.
This last year has involved a lot of blind hatred of policing and poorly thought out calls to reduce police funding all based on very rare anecdotal incidents which have been spun as data. The reality is that police forces in America have hundreds of millions of interactions with citizens and almost none of them are problematic. It do surprise that surveys show public perceptions of police brutality are incredibly skewed, far from resort (https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/cases-of-police-brutality-agai...).
I can only describe the current trend as a mass hysteria driven by biased news media and dedicated true believers, who organize on social media and real life, and end up influencing the masses into believing the same things.
As for policing: Seattle’s police force was too small even before the calls for defunding. It severely lagged the median police officer counts among cities in America. That, combined with an ideologically driven city attorney’s office, has led to a revolving door of criminals that signals to other criminals that they’ll face no consequences for their actions. That in turn has induced more and more criminality.
This is interesting, because the evidence for your claim is anecdotes and “posts on NextDoor” — what statistical evidence do you have that crime is increasing more in “more permissive” cities vs “less permissive” ones? I would also invite you to consider that COVID may have more to do with this than anything else.
I also invite you to consider people who commit crimes as human beings with needs like you and I — needs that are often unmet: housing, healthcare, community, and which are not resolved by locking them up.
But regardless, truth starts with observations and anecdotes. In Seattle, reliable data measuring crime is hard to come by since people have become jaded and simply don’t report crime any longer. The police are understaffed (well below median police officers per capita in the country) and are directed by city leadership to deprioritize such investigations, so residents don’t see a benefit from reporting. I’ll admit I am part of the problem - the other day I saw a homeless person expose herself in front of children and I didn’t bother reporting it to any authority because nothing will be done and I am just exhausted by all of it. The only time residents bother is if they are victims of property crime that is large enough to make the insurance deductible worth it.
In the case of police shooting unarmed blacks, we already have the data. The Washington Post has maintained these records (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...). It gives us a clear sense of the magnitude of the issue at hand. This is also why surveys are able to say that people overestimate the frequency of police brutality.
> I also invite you to consider people who commit crimes as human beings with needs like you and I — needs that are often unmet
They are free to meet those needs the way anyone else does, by showing personal responsibility for their life choices. I have little sympathy for those who decide to live a drug centric lifestyle. And likewise, people shouldn’t move to a desirable, expensive location unless they have a plan on how to make it work. Existing residents should not have to subsidize either group, with their money or by giving up their quality of life.
Look up “just world fallacy”
The project itself has tons of managerial types (who happily put PDAP on their linkedin pages..) trying to manage the 2,500 people who have joined their slack, however only a small number of contributors are actually working on scrapers (~2), who like I said -- are focusing on "criminal" datasets and not datasets around accountability. In doing so, they're effectively ignoring the core of the data that exists to aid in police accountability, eg complaints and misconduct records themselves. This shouldn't be a surprise, since police agencies tend NOT to provide information online that could be used against them in court, and they WILL fight to the teeth to prevent the release of damning records. Souce: I spend a lot of time with FOIA trying to get misconduct records..
The group's foundation is also shaky. The group was started by owners of a marketing company, frac.tl that specializes in exploiting emotions to turn something viral, which on its own should raise flags. The blog post that "started" their supposed movement has three listed writers over the course of several months [1][2][3]. The data from this blog post (afaict the only dataset actually released that's tied to this project) was found to contain private information and had to be cleaned up - 6mo after it was pushed onto github and forked many times.
If you are looking for a group to support, please consider either volunteering with or donating to local police accountability groups. Your time/donations would be much better served with them.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191118214540/https://lawsuit.o...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200518181855/https://lawsuit.o...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200527213804/https://lawsuit.o...
Edit: Found the answer, they dont have any publicily available. Lol.
> Our data isn't hosted anywhere yet.