Our approach to scraping
Which data are we scraping?
Public records about the criminal legal system: police, courts, and jails.
Contributing Philosophy
Typically, it's only worth writing a scraper if you have a use case for the data already, and you can't easily download what you need. What question are you trying to answer?
Scraping can turn cumbersome records into useful data. When someone wants to use records but they're in a difficult format, scraping is often the answer.
Where the community fits in
Our target users are the thousands of people already using police data. We can support their work by connecting the community of PDAP volunteer scrapers with real, impactful projects. If you don't have your own ideas about what to scrape, head to our volunteer page to see if any open requests catch your interests. You can also find local groups working on the criminal legal system.
Immediate goals
After hundreds of hours of user research, we have determined that these are how we will add value in the police data landscape.
Track independently scraped data in our Data Sources database. Prevent duplication of effort by showing people what's already out there. To submit data you've scraped, start here.
Connect people with web scraping skills to community members trying to make better use of police data without technical expertise. Volunteer to respond to requests here.
Build open-source tools in the Scrapers repo to make running a scraper on-demand easier for people who don't know what "CLI" means.
Scrape data sources and agency metadata via our Data Source Identification pipeline. Especially important are Data Sources with a record type of "List of Data Sources."
How to contribute
We're still in the iteration and case study phase. If you want to learn something about the police, you can write a scraper to parse, normalize, or get deeper information from our Data Sources.
If you don't have scraping skills, you can use the #data-exchange channel in Discord to find someone who may be able to help.
Run a Scraper you wrote, or one from the Scrapers Repo, to get an extraction.
Share your extraction and what you learned in Discord.
We'll all learn about the criminal legal system from the experience, and brainstorm ways our tools could better facilitate your work.
Repeat!
Not immediate priorities
Aggregation and hosting of scraped data
In our experience, if you can find someone interested in using the data, storage typically takes care of itself.
It's not an immediate priority to make a big database to store scraped data in the same format. The main reason this isn't a priority: this is not what our users are asking us for. It's almost everyone's first thought when they hear about our project (us too). Our research tells us access, organization, and communication are the bottleneck for people using the data.
Aggregation is incredibly complex, and involves more than just mapping properties. So much context is needed before data from two departments can be compared.
Publishing and vouching for extracted data, and documenting its provenance so it can be audited, is a big project. We only want to undertake this work for data we know will be useful.
Automated scraper farms
It's not an immediate priority to automate the running of all the scrapers in our shared repo. The main reason: this is not what our users are asking us for. We plan to archive the sources, and facilitate sharing of scraper code. If we have a stable archive, scraping can be done on-demand.
Scrape all the data!
Scraping is hard work, and there are hundreds of thousands of potential data sources out there. For many applications, data doesn't even need to be processed to be useful—it just needs to be findable. We don't need to scrape things unless it's clearly adding value.
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