Earlier this summer, bystanders on Pittsburgh’s North Side captured video of several police officers pulling a Black man with a physical disability from his car and pinning him to the ground. The arrest drew swift criticism on social media and triggered a review by an independent police accountability group.
Incidents like this often leave people asking: Was racial profiling involved? A new data tool aims to make that easier to answer.
The Police Data Accessibility Project (PDAP), a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit working to make policing data more accessible, recently released the Police Data Access Point, which allows users to create an account and receive automatic updates when new data about police systems becomes available — in any location across the US.
“This data belongs to us, but police systems don’t always have the incentive to make it as accessible as possible,” Josh Chamberlain, PDAP’s executive director, told Technical.ly. “The access point is a polished interface for searching and finding data in a durable, repeatable way.”
Previously, PDAP’s database was available as a large Airtable spreadsheet, which could be intimidating for people who are less data savvy, Chamberlain said. It was primarily used by researchers, academics or policy workers. The new tool is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to a broader audience.
Plus, with user accounts now available, the PDAP can tailor its data collection to better match users’ needs.
“In the past, you never really knew who was looking at your Airtable and what they were using it for,” Chamberlain said, “but we’re hoping to learn more about our users by having them sign in, having them follow things and then taking action based on that. If we see we have a ton of followers in Oklahoma, we are going to prioritize collecting and documenting data there.”
Organizing info from more than 2,600 sources
The PDAP’s database has been used to uncover potential policing bias in the past.
In 2022, Black drivers were over two times more likely to be stopped for traffic violations than white drivers, according to an investigation from Pittsburgh’s Public Source that used data from the PDAP. At the time of the investigation, Pittsburgh’s police chief acknowledged that policing was more prevalent in the city’s Black communities, and local advocates said they were preparing new legislation to address the issue.
Police transparency is increasingly an issue, especially as the current federal administration shifts away from it. In Pittsburgh, Beth Pittinger, executive director of the independent Citizen Police Review Board (CPRB), has said the watchdog agency has lost access to police body-worn camera footage under Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration.
PDAP’s access point tool should make it easier for researchers, journalists and community members to find and use public data for more reporting, research and advocacy, per Chamberlain.
“Police have a lot of power. Courts have a lot of power. It’s really important that any kind of public system is transparent,” they said.
The database pulls from over 2,600 sources, offering insight into police agencies, courts and jails across all 50 states. Users can learn about police budgets, disciplinary complaints, arrest records or any other publicly available information.
It was built using a combination of automated tools and volunteer efforts. The team uses web scrapers to collect potential data sources from the internet. Then these sources are reviewed and labeled by volunteers who manually catalog and verify the relevance of each source before it’s added to the database.
While all this data is already publicly available, records are often disorganized, hard to find on obscure municipal websites or kept behind request processes.
“We want to become an index of all of these different collection efforts, and then also an index at the local level of any kind of data that could be useful,” Chamberlain said. “Even in Pittsburgh, there are people doing advocacy every day that aren’t aware of some obscure policy PDF on the county website or [other data] that might be useful for legislation they’re drafting.”
Born in the BLM era, continuing despite federal rollbacks
In May 2020, Floridian Kristin Tynski posted on Reddit about how she had scraped public police records in Palm Beach County “to find dirty cops.”
She invited others to try the same in their own communities, writing, “If cops can watch us, we should watch them.”
A few days later, George Floyd was murdered in police custody, kicking off a summer of widespread Black Lives Matter protests, and Tynski’s Slack channel to organize police accountability efforts exploded with new members.
Chamberlain was one of those Slack channel members, and in subsequent years, they’ve seen multiple success stories and setbacks.
Along with reporting efforts in Pittsburgh, the database has been used at UC Berkeley to analyze how police use-of-force cases move through the legal system and whether legal accountability mechanisms actually work.
The PDAP has also prevented the loss of temporary police data. For example, in Oakland, California, calls for service data are only available online for one or two days before being removed. Without an automatic scraper designed by the PDAP, that data would be lost forever, Chamberlain said.
Under the Biden administration, police accountability got a federal boost. A 2022 executive order mandated the Justice Department build a National Law Enforcement Accountability Database that would centralize officers’ misconduct records. But when Trump took office, he revoked the executive order, effectively decommissioning the database.
Regardless of who’s in charge, the PDAP will continue expanding its database, Chamberlain said. The org is actively seeking storytellers who can translate the data into information that helps everyday people push for change in these powerful systems.
“I think at different points in the org’s history we may have had more hope that the federal government might make use of our work or pick up the work,” Chamberlain said, “but I think this highlights that independent efforts are going to be more durable.”
