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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.
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.
- 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.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.Process records into usable data, using code if needed. Read more about how PDAP approaches web scraping here.
- 4.Analyze and report the results. Share your process in Discord, so we can learn and improve our processes together!
- Use the data we're already tracking in our Data Sources database to answer questions about our most critical systems. What are the causes and effects of increased transparency?
- We pair volunteers with open community data requests. Fill out this form if you're a persistent researcher, good with data, or interested in web scraping.
- You can contribute Python or Vue code toward our software objectives. Find a good first issue to work on here, or check out our roadmap.
Last modified 3d ago