Hundreds of police agencies and sheriff offices are making their crime data openly available. We wanted to make sure we highlighted the great qualities of an open crime data feed and continue to implore agencies to make their crime data feeds as useful and complete as possible.
We’ve found that sharing data openly is a good indicator that a police agency has control over their data, they are not afraid of accountability, they can manage confidential and non-confidential elements, and they are a good player with state and national law enforcement. Remember, ‘open’ means the data is available in machine readable format for anyone to collect, use, and share without restrictions.
Good Qualities
It is RMS and CAD data – both tell different stories and are both important.Lat/long coordinates – helps with geocoding accuracy.Machine readable – PDF is NOT machine readable.
It follows a standard – ex: SOCS.
It is updated frequently – hourly or daily.
It is continuous and consistent – the data is kept the same unless improvements, like adding lat/long coordinates or descriptions, are made. It’s hard to process data that keeps changing location, platform, or structure. Make sure to let consumers know when changes are made.
There is a level of accountability – There is contact information for the public to ask questions, opening a feedback loop with consumers. Change logs are kept and made public.
It is uniform – same feed that’s being shared with one is shared with all. This helps avoid confusion. For example, if a crime mapping vendor is given CAD data but the media data file only holds RMS data it can cause confusion and may even lead to people drawing the wrong conclusions.
It is accessible – data is easy to find by anyone.
Bad Qualities
It is varied – rhe format and location frequently.
It is incomplete – There is missing data points like a block level address location, date, or time.
No contact information for the person(s) in charge of the feed is listed.
It is not accessible – Emailing out data is good, but it’s more accessible to anyone when it’s published directly the the Internet.
There is preferential access given – some agencies give their private vendors early access to public information over the public. Don’t do this. Unfairly distributing public data by giving preference to one company generally seems like a bad idea for transparency and democracy.
It is no updated frequently – Monthly or quarterly updates are almost useless to residents. Yearly data is cringeworthy. The events are so far in the past, they are no longer relevant.
Brittany Suszan 