[Pittsburgh, PA]
The Police Data Accessibility Project (PDAP) has opened up the Police Data Access Point for public signups at https://pdap.io. Free accounts give people the ability to “Follow” any location or type of data in the United States and receive automatic updates when we find new data about police systems. Meanwhile, PDAP staff and volunteers prioritize documenting data sources for followed locations, creating a database that is responsive to community interests.
In 2025, we built a self-sustaining system where community needs drive our data identification priorities by allowing users to both document gaps and fulfill community requests. In our controlled beta, we searched for data in 15 followed locations and labeled hundreds of new sources together. Now, we are refining and repeating this model to locate data nationwide.
We are thrilled to share the next iteration of PDAP with our community. We have spent the past year collecting feedback, refining our product, and creating a suite of tools to make police data more accessible to anyone who uses it. By creating an account and following places that matter to them, people are not only accessing information but driving what data gets discovered next.
— Josh Chamberlain, Executive Director at PDAP
This launch builds on the 2024 release of our Data Sources Search, which enables users to find anything from department budgets and policies to dispatch logs and arrest records. Users turn to PDAP to answer critical questions: What data does my local department publish, and how do they handle privacy? How are local services set up to respond to calls? Where do I begin my research about police activity where I live?
PDAP’s database currently documents over 20,000 police agencies, courts, and jails. It catalogues over 2,500 Data Sources with metadata about the agency, format, and coverage of the source. We estimate that at least 100,000 Data Sources may already be published on the internet waiting to be catalogued, not including records that can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
PDAP was founded in 2020, and took shape as a nonprofit producing open-source tools for using public data. It is based in Pittsburgh, where its data has been cited in pieces like this one, but it has members across the United States. PDAP has received financial and advisory support from The Heinz Endowments, Gabriel Weinberg, and individuals from our community.