Map police complaints to the Police Advisory Commission (PAC) on this new app from Comcast Interactive Media software developer Mike Ball. The PAC is a civilian oversight board that hears complaints against officers.
Ball, a West Philadelphian who started working on the project at the BarCamp News Innovation News Hackathon last month and won first place for his preliminary work on it, used the 2009-2012 data that the PAC released in January. Users can sort the complaints by demographics of the complainant, type of complaint and more.
The police complaints mapped here are a subset of total police complaints. The Philadelphia Police Department receives about 700-800 complaints annually, whereas the PAC receives anywhere between 50-300 complaints annually, according to PAC director Kelvyn Anderson. Anderson is working on getting the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau to release its complaint data.
Anderson said he’ll update the data in early June, and at that point, Ball will update the tool, Ball said.
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