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Welcome to PDAP!

Our mission is to help people locate, understand, and share public records about every U.S. police system.
Read more about our mission at https://pdap.io/.

What we do

We're making an open-source toolkit for transparency-minded people who use data about police systems in their work. To start, we're cataloguing sources of data in a database so people can find data about their local systems.

Plans for the future

Our investigative process

  1. 1.
    Ask a question or make a hypothesis about the police. For example, "how do police misconduct settlements affect local budgets?" This is the "Why?" of our work. All research begins with a question.
  2. 2.
    Locate public records to help you answer this question. You may find what you need in our working Data Sources database, through your own research, or by requesting data from our community.
  3. 3.
    Process records into usable data, using code if needed. Read more about how PDAP approaches web scraping here.
  4. 4.
    Analyze and report the results. Share your process in Discord, so we can learn and improve our processes together!

Get involved

Everyone is welcome in our Discord, or email inbox at [email protected].

Journalists, Activists, Researchers, and other data users

Data Volunteers & Web Scrapers

Code Volunteers

Donors

  • Start here. We're a non-profit, so your donations may be tax-deductible.