Links

Request data

Get help from the PDAP community

Here is our data request form. You can reach us at [email protected] if you have questions about this process.

The investigative process

The PDAP team and volunteers work together to answer questions and learn about the police through public criminal legal system records.
  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.
  2. 2.
    Locate public records to help you answer this question. You may find what you need in our working Data Sources database.
  3. 3.
    Access the records however you can. Typically this happens via the internet or a public records request.
  4. 4.
    Use scrapers, if needed, to parse or process records into usable data. Read more about how PDAP approaches scraping here.
  5. 5.
    Analyze and report the results. Share your process in Discord, so we can learn and improve our processes together!