After a successful beta testing period, we have opened the doors for all! If you have not signed up yet, please go for it and let us know what you think.

Help us build momentum

Now is the time to send everyone you know to https://pdap.io. We rely on our community to spread the word!

You can feel free to use or modify this message as a starting point:

[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

As promised, newsletter subscribers are invited to participate in our "controlled beta". If you are reading this, we could use your feedback!

Get a PDAP account to help shape our future

If you’d like to receive a PDAP account, reply to this email with the email address you’d like to use for an account. I’ll send you instructions!

What's new?

Greetings, PDAP subscriber! It’s been a while. We only write when there’s something to share...and we’ve been busy.

We launched the Police Data Access Point!

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?

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!

Data requests

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.

Hello, PDAP subscriber!

If you're a new subscriber who found us via Data is Plural, welcome!

Database & search

We've been busy since we released our search app at the end of last year.

Hello, PDAP subscriber!

This is an exciting day: we have launched our Data Sources App with the "quick search" feature, and we are looking ahead to what's next.

App launch!

Our app is designed to make it easy to search our database. Check it out at pdap.io. Our updated website shows what we've accomplished and puts the search function front and center. For more context, read the press release here.

Using Public Data to Understand Police Systems: PDAP's Data Sources Search

[Pittsburgh, PA]

The Police Data Accessibility Project (PDAP) has made its library of Data Sources available to search at pdap.io. Anyone with a question about their local police system can use this first-of-its-kind tool to find relevant public data about agencies across the United States.

The new search function helps people search the community-maintained database based on type of record and location. For example: use of force reports in California; traffic stops in Pennsylvania; calls for service across all agencies. Anyone can submit a new Data Source, or request help from the community. Examples of data in action are visible at https://pdap.io/data.

Hello, PDAP subscriber!

This is the final newsletter before the launch of our app. If you'd like to be an early tester, reply to this email.

Giving Tuesday

We're working to grow our numbers of small individual donors. Recurring small donations—even $10 a month—give us the flexibility to find data for a requestor, prototype a new app, or give volunteers rewards for their efforts.

Greetings, PDAP community!

We've been busy. This edition, we'll cover our progress on the mission, spotlight Data Sources and opportunities from our community, and share a fundraising update.

Mission & product updates

Our team continues to make progress towards the vision: when you ask PDAP a question about the police system, we can tell you what kinds of records to seek out, how to access them, and whether we know of potential collaborators. We do this already, but our team is building custom tools to scale the work.

Greetings, PDAP community! Fundraising news is at the top this time, but there's more down below as always.

Fundraising update

We would like to thank Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo and other things, for his generous donation of $100,000. In addition to financial support, he has offered to be an advisor and sounding board to us as we solve problems. This will change our year!

Thank you, newsletter readers, for the interest, conversations, questions, and support. We are excited about the progress we've made since our founding in 2020. Today, I am asking for your financial support to help us further the mission at PDAP. To donate and learn more about how you can make a difference, please visit our website. Thank you again for joining the PDAP movement!

Greetings, PDAP community!

We don’t usually send more than one newsletter a month, so hopefully you will tolerate our spam just this once. In addition to a job post, I’m sharing a couple recent highlights from our Data Sources database.

Jobs

We’re hiring for three part-time roles: an Open-source Facilitator, contract-based software development opportunities, and a Development Director. You can see details and apply here. Please share these with anyone who might be a good fit!

Hello, data nerds & PDAP observers! We have a lot of good updates in this edition. As always, reply to this email if you have thoughts or comments.

Helping with data in Pittsburgh

Our HQ and proving ground is in Pittsburgh. If we can help people here use data to answer questions, we can apply those strategies anywhere in the country.

Traffic stops legislation

Machine learning update

Disclaimer: we were interested in machine learning at least a week before the recent hype started. With that out of the way…

What if there were tens of thousands of criminal justice agencies, each with dozens of potentially useful data sources sprawled across a handful of websites and subdomains? Actually…this is not hypothetical. Finding useful gems on the internet is an ongoing project of ours. Humans are good at identifying whether a web page is about the police, whether it’s useful, and in which format it’s published. Can we teach a computer to do the same thing?

One of our creative volunteers used Common Crawl to generate a list of 50,000 URLs featuring potential data about the police. They also set up a text classification pipeline for adding labels. Another spectacular volunteer created a working machine learning model trained on these labels, and we’re starting to be able to identify URLs. Exciting stuff!

Data requests in Michigan and Arkansas

We're spreading the word that we can help people access data, and we got two recent requests that could use some extra hands.

One is for investigating the results of calls for service from the Detroit Police Department, to help local advocates develop policy for the upcoming city budget negotiations. We'll need help with data collection and analysis.

The other is for data related to juvenile justice in five majority-Black counties in Southeast Arkansas to help evaluate the equity of the systems there. We're gearing up for a records requests push—if you can use a web browser, you can help!

Happy new year! We're about halfway through our first grant period, and some of the seeds we've been planting are starting to sprout.

New: request data from PDAP

We published a new form for requesting data. If you have a question about your local police system, give it a try. We have been informally connecting our staff and volunteers with projects in need of data assistance, doing work like locating records and contributing data analysis code. Now, we'll track these requests in a database and try to fulfill as many as we can. Your project could be next!

If you're in Discord and you gave yourself a role in the #welcome channel, you'll start getting pinged as we get more requests. If you'd like to be notified when we need help with scraping, or to find data in your area, reply to this email.

We're often asked how we think all this data about the police will be used. The answer is that it's being used every day, but there's a steep learning curve for finding and accessing it...that's where we come in!

Using calls for service to study police activity

Across the country, communities are reimagining public safety where they live. One of the first steps of this process is understanding what kind of work we ask police to do when we call them. Who shows up to help when people contact 911 about a mental health issue? How about a found animal, or an abandoned vehicle?

Some places publish a description of these calls somewhere on the internet. Here are some we know about.

Hi there,

Thanks for subscribing to email updates from the Police Data Accessibility Project!

An update

Since I last wrote in August, we’ve made a working prototype and real progress toward the first of our three major milestones.

Hi there,

Thanks for subscribing to email updates from the Police Data Accessibility Project!

Most timely: we’re having our first Community Call since we took on full-time staff, this Tuesday the 23rd at 2pm ET. It’s held in our Discord, and you can RSVP at the event here. We’ll ask people to share what they see in the police data ecosystem, and give our own updates. I hope to see you there!

If you’ve never used Discord, have no fear: it’s a chat forum like Slack but more fitting for our particular community. We’ll all join a group audio channel, where people can listen in or participate in the interactive elements!

As planned, we're using the money from our first grant award to cover two full-time salaries! For the first time, we will have a small full-time staff dedicated to bringing the PDAP vision of a transparent police system a reality.

Who we hired

Josh Chamberlain has been volunteering with PDAP for about a year and a half, using their design background to crystallize what PDAP is building and why. They also do Executive Director things, like keeping PDAP legally established and looking for funding.

Jacob Quinn Sanders now has responsibility for our code, working with the PDAP community to create the best possible open-source utilities for accessing police data. He has a fantastic background as a news reporter and editor, often working on the municipal data problems we're trying to solve here. He has since established himself as a programmer, data expert, and all around great fit for the role at PDAP.