Mission

We aim to be a source of truth for police data.

There are about 18,000 police organizations, and each has a unique way to make data public. This means that, effectively, the data is not public. We can make it public by consolidating it. We speculate that the key audience is data scientists and journalists. They do the analysis, and are the critical channel for information to flow from police organizations to policymakers and the general public.

Each of us has a different vision for the future of law enforcement, but the first step is always the same: understanding the current state of policing.

Where are we now?

For an up to the moment answer, you can look to our Roadmap.

Welcome to the early days.

We submitted our Form 1023 to the IRS in January. It takes 6–12 months to get official nonprofit status. We came into being as an entity (Delaware C-corp) in December and our first 990 (all zeros) will be filed in the coming weeks by the registered agent we hired in Delaware. Our PayPal is up and we are have gotten enough donations to cover start up costs and a few licenses for basic infrastructure tools like Jira and hosting.

Right now our focus is on documenting an end-to-end proof of concept of our vision for for a small geographic area.

Isn't the scope of this project too big?

We've been hearing that since the very first day, and decided to try anyway.

Since late May 2020, our online population peaked and declined. After some iteration, a core group of 4–8 long term members has been keeping the project moving with the contributions of a rotating talent pool of volunteers.

How are we planning to grow?

We become more effective as we scale each of these services.

​Collection is the group of automated and manual processes that legally gather police data.

​Storage must be archival, verifiable, and secure.

​Standardization normalizes information into a unified format for access at scale.

​Access is anything between a direct download and API web hooks.