Hello, PDAP subscriber!
We're coming up on the end of a busy summer, during which we’ve been building the next version of our app and responding to data requests. Hopefully you have appreciated the lack of email spam, because we have a lot to share!
In the first part of the summer, we worked with CAASI at the University of Pittsburgh on a pilot of our “Data help desk” concept, where a multidisciplinary group of students gains credit and experience while meeting real data needs of folks in the county. The results are here, and if you scroll a bit, you can see what we learned from the experience.
We’ve worked on other requests, including one for policies & procedures for every police agency in Allegheny County. We made over 100 Right-to-Know requests and responses are trickling in. Although policies are public record and relatively dull, there’s a spectrum of responses: they are already published online; denying the request for “proprietary reasons” (not a legal reason); ignoring the request and hoping the next letter is not from a lawyer.
You can see our current and past data requests here, or make your own.
As quickly as they appear, tasks are being closed by our team as we progress toward the next version of our app. If you’d like to follow along or contribute, here is the parent GitHub issue, and (one, two) major updates.
Next up, we’re refining the front end and implementing our features for login and notifications. We’re are still pre-alpha, but that will change soon!
A requestor local to Pittsburgh was interested in comparative data—could we find arrests which contained the race of arrestees? One of our community members found several in our database, helping make this analysis of racial disparities in Pittsburgh possible.
In February, this Wired article about ShotSpotter referenced a leak of locations, and shared some analysis, but not the source data. We came across this scrape of the article, and quickly listed it as a source in our database with the article as its “readme”. This is a valuable source of data about police activity, and may be the perfect starting point for analysis—but does it have the same rigor or integrity as a state- or ShotSpotter-published database, assuming one existed? Our database tracks who published each source, so you can make your own decision.
We are grateful to have been included in the final 2 years of The Heinz Endowments’ 3-year period of funding projects working toward a fairer legal system. This has allowed us to have a paid Executive Director and software developers. On October 30, our funding from them expires.
The good news: we have been careful to keep some money in the bank. Our limited hosting overhead is covered by our lovely monthly donors. So far, we have received $102,928 in individual contributions this year—combined with the $101,969 we received last year, we have a little under a year of runway to either raise more money or reduce our staffing. This is a luxury not afforded to many nonprofits at this stage of their lifecycle.
As a result we have been able to bring our our most prolific software development contractor in as a full-time Lead Software Engineer. Max Chis has proven to be a thoughtful contributor and mentor, moving us forward on everything from authentication and automation our new API. We are pleased to have him as a stable member of the team!
The risk: one generous donor is responsible for $200,000 of those individual contributions, and there’s no guarantee it will continue. The mission is to earn the trust of potential donors: make progress, demonstrate impact, and facilitate the use of police data by our community.
As always, thank you for your support and attention! Feel free to reply with comments or questions.
—Josh from PDAP