Greetings, PDAP subscriber! It’s been a while. We only write when there’s something to share...and we’ve been busy.
If you visit https://pdap.io, you will see the Police Data Access Point. This is the name we have given to our core database and search app. Most of the content on the website has been updated. What do you think of this new iteration? We still have changes in the works, so now is a great time for feedback.
This is part of the “v2 project”, which is feature-complete and being carefully rolled out. Have you seen the new API docs?
Stay tuned about these features, nearly ready for beta testing:
Once these features are live, we will do some significant outreach and a press release to drive traffic and signups.
We have taken leaps in our API, database, automation, internal tooling, and new developer experience that did not seem possible at the start of 2024. I'd like to shout out two contributors in particular, who make up the core software development team:
Max Chis joined PDAP first as a volunteer, then worked as a contract developer. He earned the full-time role of Lead Software Engineer by bringing vast stores of positive energy and a thorough, considered process to any project.
Joshua Graber is our Lead Front End Developer, and makes the most of the time he shares with PDAP as a contractor. His experience helps keep our interface professional, accessible, and performant.
The award for "Most Improved" goes this year to the Data Source ID repository. This is our toolset for growing and maintaining our database, with human support. We started 2024 with a few disconnected tools for labeling data, but now have a true pipeline for proactively gathering potential sources, human-labeling them, and improving our understanding of what data is out there.
Contributors Marty, Kylie, and Jon led most of the early development effort. Max, supported by volunteer contributors, is forging ahead with the 2025 plan in the first part of this year. We will share metrics from our collection efforts as we go.
We began 2025 with $125,000 in the bank, 100% from individual contributors. This gives us about 6 months' runway. Much of this sum is due to the generous contributions of Gabriel Weinberg, but we had small donations totaling $1,970 in 2023 and $4,190 in 2024. That's more than doubled! We spend about $200–300 per month on hosting and product-related fees, so this support is enough to keep our current services online.
The Heinz Endowments' funding expired in 2024. We are grateful to them for supporting our staff for two years, during our "startup" period. Now, it's time to prove our worth by making an impact. We have an ambitious goal to expand our individual donations to $125,000 in 2025, so that we can continue to pay our staff to maintain and improve our tools.
Our trajectory is toward creating a durable, self-serve community resource that requires maintenance and guidance by a tiny staff. We hope to achieve financial stability by providing a helpful service to more people than ever in 2025. If you would like to support this work, you can do so here: https://pdap.io/donate
In our home of Allegheny County, an "Alternative Response" program called A-Team has been created to respond to 911 calls. The County handles dispatch for most local agencies, so could have numerous impact on the reality of police response.
Unfortunately, Allegheny County only publishes EMS & Fire response data, so it's not possible for independent researchers to understand how the new system is working, or how it affects police response. Our right-to-know request was met with no response.
We are working with University of Pittsburgh students to document the potential impact of this missing data by finding quality studies and comparing their sources to ours.
Executive Order 14145 rescinds Executive Order 14074, which established the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database and required submission of Use of Force data to an FBI database, among other things.
However, independent efforts like the National Police Index are resistant to changes in federal policy. It recently launched as the most complete public database of police employment history and complaints in the country.
I'm so honored to be able to share this progress with you. As the first to get updates about our work, the newsletter audience is a valuable source of feedback. Please reply to this email or make noise in Discord if you have opinions to share.
Thank you for your support and attention!
—Josh C from PDAP