BetaNYC’s Crime and Public Safety Data Hack Night

Strangely, those charged with protecting public safety don’t always like to make it easy to assess how safe a given part of town actually is. That was an undercurrent of the conversation last night at BetaNYC‘s 2nd Beyond Transparency Hack Night, on Crime and Public Safety Data, at the Blue Ridge Foundation‘s office on Court Street.

Some resources that hackers began exploring last night included the NYPD crash data bandaid. One pair of hackers there had already begun a project related to crash data, but needed a better source of information to flesh it out. They believed they found it here. Technically Brooklyn will report back when that project is complete.

Thomas Levine, who attended the first Beyond Transparency meetup, went home and built a way to use the limited crime data released by the NYPD in more ways. His project is still midway. You’d need to be a developer to really make use of it, but a team of hackers last night put there heads together on how to proceed on it.

BetaNYC Meetup members take a bite out of crime (data).

Ariel Kennan, a former Code For America fellow who helped to organize the hack night, explained that the vision for the series is to get a lot of good projects started at the meetups. Then certain hacks will rise to the top. In an ideal world, she explained, some of the most interesting creations will come to the Code Across America event in February (time and place, TBD), where Kennan expects elected civic leaders to attend. If that happens, and officials begin engaging hackers face-to-face, that’s when she believes some of these projects could become really powerful.

Another organizer of the night, Chris Whong, expressed a similar sentiment. He said that the magic of hack nights isn’t in what happens at the actual meetups, but the connections people make at them and the way certain people tend to take those beginnings home and build out really special projects.

That’s why Whong worked with another meetup attendee last night to develop a page where BetaNYC hackers could post their projects. He said the group needs some sort of coordination online, so they can build what he called “a cadence” of projects starting, developers contributing and the strongest projects getting completed and pushed out into the world.