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The Police Data Accessibility Project (github.com/police-data-accessibility-pro...)
236 points by cpascal on June 1, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 90 comments



I find these projects potentially dangerous and for people who have been arrested in a state where the case is dismissed but they cannot expunge because of the type of charge.

I was falsely arrested under the belief of arson. It happened when I was in my early 20s. The charges were dismissed and my expensive lawyer said it was the best deal to end it all. There wasn't even a fire and a cop that made the arrest had no reason to assume I was trying to start a fire. In any case, I still have to wait a few years to even expunge it.

Well, when going through university I was bullied & ostracized for a period of time and eventually found out someone had googled my name. They could see the arrest on some website and just the type of charge it was.


This sounds similar to the "right to be forgotten" concept in EU law where citizens can complain to Google to have their records removed from the search engine, but there is no way to delete all data about the incident.

I don't want to trivialize the pain a wrongful arrest ad bullying caused, but I think the solution to the underlying problem is more sunlight, not less. Without being able to see how many wrongful/unfruitful arrests happened at the hands of your arresting officer and DA, power might go unchecked for longer and grow more corrupt.


Oh my life was ruined at the time and I had to leave for another university. So I like to think you're not trivializing it. Happened in the USA and so no way to have the right to be forgotten. I ended up changing my name.


I'm sorry it happened to you and I'm frequently ashamed of our legal system. It's obviously not perfect, but sometimes it feel like the people who work in it don't have the capability to improve it.


I believe Reply All did a podcast on 'services' that essentially blackmail you by taking arrest records and placing them on the first page of google. So an arrest can become a black mark on your record. Or, you pay up. Pretty scummy stuff


I wonder if you could sue the website or police officer for libel?


Statutes of limitation makes suing the police officer impossible at this point.

Some context: I'm not from an upperclass family and me just paying for the lawyer to get the case dismissed really hurt financially. As well with the strain on my parents.

At the time of the event, lawyers told me it's very hard to make anything worth the effort & cost and unless clear video evidence exists of what happened. It would have been my testimony against the police officer. Police have good lawyers when they're being sued as well.

I was unsure about suing a website for libel. I did research the laws around it and services do exist to attempt at removing similar material online of what happened against me. I thought after finding out why I was bullied that it wasn't guaranteed and changing my name would likely be sufficient. At this point in my life I'm still not financially well off to care enough anymore. I work in academia and I moved outside of the USA after graduating.

I did learn a lot from what happened. It can really hurt to not be financially well off, the system really harms people even if they're innocent and not everyone has a happy story of lawyers lining up to take on injustice.


Someone told me the other day that they had investigated the Minneapolis police blotter, after the reporting that the majority of people arrested were from out of state. That investigation turned up that the blotter didn't agree, and shortly after it was revealed the police issued an apology.

Denver made a similar report, but have not made their arrest records public, for some reason...


Denver is so far from any other major city outside of their state. Do they expect us to believe that there are hordes of people from Colby, Kansas that drove for hours just to riot?

Minneapolis is reasonable considering its the epicenter of the current issue and reasonable driving distance from Wisconsin.


What's so different between Minneapolis and Wisconsin that hordes of Wisconsinites would come to town to do things that Minneapolans would never do? That seems implausible, at least to a know-nothing outsider like me.


The only thing I can think of is to show support in the city where Floyd was killed.


For sure, but why would the Wisconsinites be behaving any differently in terms of violence, looting, etc.? I suppose it could be selection bias. Maybe it takes a higher level of anger to drive a couple hours than to go someplace local, and that's more correlated with violent behavior.


Minneapolis is where the inciting incident, the murder of George Floyd, occurred and thus became the epicenter of the current wave of protests.


The police issued an apology? How about we fire someone for this. There have to be consequences or the system doesn't work.


> How about we fire someone for this. There have to be consequences or the system doesn't work.

Why do you think people are protesting or rioting? There are a ton of people who feel like their desire to change "the system" is falling on deaf ears.

Elections and lawsuits are really the only meaningful power the average person has over those in power. Other than that, it's up to people in power to check others in power via "checks and balances".


The citizens of the united states of america have a 2nd amendment.

I might be naive, but I think most populations around the world would have revolted much earlier if they were armed the way americans are.


> The citizens of the united states of america have a 2nd amendment.

The 2A's only role in US society is to allow some people to buy some small arms some of the time and otherwise doesn't have any place in America until the country falls (at which point all of the laws/amendments are not relevant). It's not like you can use your weapon on a government official and claim under the 2A you were protecting yourself against the government. You still get prosecuted for murder; only jury nullification would save you at that point.

> if they were armed the way americans are

You forget that our military is the largest in the world with lots of recent experience in {counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and psychological operations}. They also have some of the best tools for identifying where most people are and are capable of shutting off most mass communications within the US if they needed to.

In the end, the political polarization is such that those who own lots of guns tend to be the same demographics who revere police/military/order and are currently in the camp that overlooks / detests the protesters, saying their complaints are overblown. I'm pretty sure that's largely due to a sustained PR effort by the post-WW2 Defense Department including sponsorships of sporting events that are more likely to attract those same demographics.


> In the end, the political polarization is such that those who own lots of guns tend to be the same demographics who revere police/military/order and are currently in the camp that overlooks / detests the protesters, saying their complaints are overblown.

I'm steeped deep in gun culture in Texas, most of my friends online are in gun culture. We are all universally outraged by what happened to George Floyd and to others. The majority of us do not support looting and pillaging, but we do support the message of the protests. In fact, the gun community has been advocating for something to be done about police militarization and the negative side effects of the War on Drugs for decades.

It is this weird thing how political divisions work, because so many people on the Left in this country assume "gun owner" == "racist white man, thin blue line, thank you for your service".

The reality is a sizable proportion of gun owners in America are lumped into a generic "conservative" bucket because of some specific issue viewpoints, which have nothing to do with actual worldview. By and large, gun owners tend to be more Libertarian than conservative, and as such view the government and the police with distrust. They view people breaking the law with even more distrust, which is why they may often support the police, but they do not support police brutality and they have deep concerns about policing in America.

It was the Libertarian think-tank The Cato Institute that spent years collating every single failed no-knock raid in America and mapping them. It's Libertarian writers like Radley Balko who've published multiple books on police misconduct. These groups and people who are opposed to police misconduct on the grounds of preserving liberty are part of gun culture.

It's really weird to me being in the tech industry as I see it's shift Leftward politically and being inundated with utterly ridiculous caricatures of people who hold similar viewpoints to me. Gun owners aren't a homogenous group, and by and large your caricature of a racist Elmer Fudd is grossly inaccurate. I have most of my teeth, am educated, work in a knowledge field, am politically active in causes which matter to me, most of which align with the positions of the Left somewhat ironically, and yes I own guns.

The real reason gun owners aren't starting an insurrection is because we have too much to lose and very little to gain. The reason CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US, and why most gun owners own many guns (which are expensive, by the way) is because as a cohort we are people who uphold order, make prudent financial and life decisions, and take our responsibilities seriously (because of course, we regularly handle deadly weapons). Insurrection has a nearly incalculable cost in human lives, has no guarantee of the end result being a better system, and essentially ends every positive thing that currently exists in your life in the blink of an eye. As you said, the 2A isn't an affirmative defense in court if you go around shooting government employees, so only people who are so thoroughly radicalized that they've effectively already distanced themselves out of society and thrown their lives away are willing to be the one to fire the first shot.

It has basically nothing to do with political affiliations and everything to do with common sense and basic prudence.


>The reason CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US, and why most gun owners own many guns (which are expensive, by the way) is because as a cohort we are people who uphold order, make prudent financial and life decisions, and take our responsibilities seriously (because of course, we regularly handle deadly weapons).

I agree with almost everything you said. Just one small point - I suspect the reason why CHL holders are the demographic with the lowest crime rate in the US is because it’s the only demographic that actively screens for past crimes before allowing you to be a member.


In many states the only criteria is "can legally own a gun" (so not a felon). I think it's more a matter of contientiousness; people who bother getting the permit (where required) are affirmatively demonstrating the wish to follow the law.


Thanks for the long, nuanced post! I like HN especially because of these.

I'm also from small town TX and I consider myself more of a libertarian-lite than a "lefty" or a "righty" in the US political spectrum, so we have some things in common. I realize I tend to look down on "those who own lots of guns" (I'm not talking about just 1-2 per family) because I consider them to be my outgroup.

I decided not to post a lot of response-per-quote after a few drafts, but I'll just say: thanks for this.


Time for some great ideas!

---------------

- Eliminate civil forfeiture, an archaic part of the policing process

- Remove the sentencing discrepancies between crack and powdered cocaine, which needlessly exacerbate the racial welfare gap (Biden erote this law btw)

- Ensure all cops wear bodycams at all time so that their integrity can never be called into question without evidence.

- Implement a UBI so that impoverished minorities can claw themselves out of a dead end system.

Things we did do!

-----------------------

- Burned Target

It's the Occupy Wall Street idiocy all over again. If you're going to protest, you need to have S.M.A.R.T. goals in mind and make sure you don't lose public goodwill to fringe radical followers (looters).


How about instead of spending trillions of dollars we don't have on UBI we actually do something that will make a difference:

1. End the war on drugs 2. Fire bad cops 3. End Qualified Immunity 4. End Civil Asset Forfeiture 5. Collect stats on every-time police force is used


It isn’t an either or. We can do both. That being said, I think firing bad cops isn’t enough. There must be criminal charges and convictions.

Personally, I’m amazed that we don’t keep publicly accessible logs of every time a police patrol car turns its lights and/or sirens on.

Firing bad cops should be swift and purposeful. I think any police officer who leaves their reflective vest on the dashboard of a private car or otherwise signals that the car belongs to a police officer, should be fired immediately with no pension. I don’t think we can do that today because the police unions are just too powerful.


You can't convince the half of the country that thinks those are tools needed to be "tough on crime" to unilaterally disarm. There has to be some concession.


I don't think there is enough political will to rally peacefully for real structural change. The average person does not want to rock the boat, they just want to go about their daily lives even if it is harder than normal, or if their kin are only "randomly" targeted as bad as that may sound.

I've seen it happening in a country that has actually, super explicit structural racist policies and laws against a minority group, and the minority just does not do anything because they're "kinda okay". They don't riot, or have any large-scale protests. They barely do protests, and even then it's rare.

I also grew up in a another country that crumbled under an authoritarian government. The government meddled with elections, caused election violence, was instigating for youth-brigade members to cause violence, seized private property, the economy exploded with thousand digit inflation, people went for weeks with barely intermittent water or electricity, etc. And still, the best people could muster was to either "leave" whilst those that stayed did their utmost best to help each-other out to make life barely not miserable.


Denver also, as of last year, encrypts its police channels, which makes any sort of outsider oversight impossible.


This is a Good Thing. Remember the Boston bomber?

I don't have a solution, but making all police communications public in real-time only puts innocent people at risk.


Removing yet another avenue for police accountability & transparency also puts innocent people at risk.


In isolated incidents, perhaps. As a general rule, no. Police officers are not evil and crooked as a general rule - only the paranoid or willfully ignorant believe that.


Police officers organizations are, as a general rule, very strongly actively supported by police officers, and police officers organizations, as a rule, strongly defend officers involved (demonstrably so, not merely accused) in corrupt and abusive acts, not just in terms of assuring adequate legal and administrative representation, but as far as publicly slandering individuals and organizations calling for the general principal of accountability and advancing specific well-founded complaints.

Police officers, therefore, are generally complicit, and actively rather than merely passively so, in perpetuating and advancing the culture of unaccountability that fosters abuse and enables those officers who are direct abusers.

Most officers may not be direct abusers but that's not the only way to actively participate in promoting abuse.


> police officers organizations, as a rule, strongly defend officers involved (demonstrably so, not merely accused) in corrupt and abusive acts

Got a source? I've worked with/dated/am related to quite a few LEOs in various parts of the country. This has never been true in my experiences. That's hardly a "rule".


The Minneapolis Mayor said that he later apologized after people looked up public arrest records that showed 80+% were from Minneapolis itself. The Mayor gave some dismissing report that he got it from the police department.


Is there a link to this or is the some one that told you, like, totes trustworthy?


A number of news organizations (local Fox affiliate, CNN, CBS[1]) verified with the county jail intake database that the first statements of the mayors were inaccurate. Both mayors retracted when contradictory evidence was presented by media.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...


Awesome! Thank you. I think we're all a little skeptical of things that easily fit the narrative we want to be true(or not). Having a source helps a lot.


Yeah, sorry about being vague. Didn't want to expose anyone to potential dox anyone. In retrospect I should have dropped the source and added the reference.


Trump turned military on their own citizens after dissidence, instead of trying to calm shit down.

Someone told you, not on paper of course but it's not a stretch to believe.

Whats easy to believe is the insane underlining racism that exists in the US. Leader of the world ? I think my Grandfather who was a lil racist (innocently enough in my upbringing. Wouldn't shop at a chinese store etc, never would act on it. Never. I imagine he'd turn his grave at the US.

The US is probably up there with the most racist country on the planet. That's insane. Might be a close cut though with Russia.

All that said, let it sink in, you've a leader who just turned the military on US citizens.

The America of the land of the free and brave.. Kinda doesn't apply anymore.

Well done America. You destroyed the ideal of what you sold everyone (that works better elsewhere).

Been nice knowing you. Enjoy.


Bringing in the national guard (and sometimes even active duty) during riots is the same thing that happened in 1962, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1980, 1992, 1999, etc etc (probably missed a lot).

So to the extent that "you've a leader who just turned the military on US citizens" is true, it's also been true for many decades.


There's a project/movement forming to gather police data and make it accessible. They are working on scrapers and filing FOIA requests for the information.

They are calling for volunteers and need technical folks like us.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataPolice/wiki/how_to_contribute


yup, this is the same group/movement


There was a similar project posted here just earlier today.

Show HN: Citizen Police Data Project – Police allegation data made accessible - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374345


I work for a company that provides software and hardware for police agencies across America.

I have been trying to think of ways to help. Some thoughts:

1. Publicly track the FOIA status of video evidence at a given agency

2. Verify the authenticity of videos floating around on the internet

3. Create a way for citizens to verify the identities of officers in an area who use our technology

4. Put out a public portal on the capabilities of body cameras by agency: what exactly they record, how and when officers can disable them, and more


Wow, that's interesting. You are not at all afraid that your customers will find out and choose another vendor which is not so keen on keeping them accountable?

Or are you going after mayors (or whatever) more set on reform?


It wouldn’t be a concern if these protests lead to a public mandate at the federal level to require all precincts to adhere to these capabilities by end of 2021.

In other words, the old way is being deprecated, and you cops need to upgrade to v2 or game over.

Need some intelligent leadership to pull this off, but it seems we lack this. We have sincere people that are providing emotional leadership, but I’m seeing very little in the realm of pragmatic and competent leadership.

No draft bills, or even a consensus list of demands by leading figures with forward thinking initiatives yet. Not good, we’re on the cusp of letting another actionable moment blow past us again.


I'm pessimistic that any real headway can be made in this area. I suspect that many local PDs purposefully obfuscate or refrain from tracking data that could be used against their efforts to maintain their existing culture; and that even in the cases of reform-minded leaders coming to power, there are interests both below and orthogonal to, and sometimes even above, them that are not on the same page[1].

Worst of all, an incomplete attempt to compile statistics that purports to be a comprehensive overview can be just as destructive as doing nothing at all. One notes how often white supremacists, racist, Neo-Nazis, and internet trolls bring up FBI arrest statistics, which rely on local LEO reporting and certainly, at the very least, reflect the known role implicit bias based on race plays in arrest rates.

[1]https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/george-floyd-minneapolis... Semi-related: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gath...


I like the spirit of this. I felt like software tech didn’t have too much of a place during the Pandemic to have an outsized impact, but here we totally do. Let’s get this data, let’s make tools to explore it, correlate it, and broadcast it.


I submitted a FOIA request last year for all parking citations issued in San Francisco. The data was truly extraordinary and showed clearly how simple street sweeping citations could lead to a car being towed, auctioned, and the owner (whose name/license plate is publicly listed if they overpaid or paid a citation twice [1]) losing their business and eventually moving elsewhere. I decided against publishing my research out of fear of encroaching on the privacy of those involved.

One story that comes to mind is the license plate HPPYPPS, a plumber whose company Happy Pipes provided service around SF. He was subject to numerous citations on the order of $1k a month. When his van was towed, he likely did not have the funds to retrieve it, and it was subsequently auctioned. He now does business under the same name, but in Utah. It is interesting to think of how much tax revenue the city actually lost by fining a small business out of existence, which was likely much greater than the total punitive fines levied against him.

In the process of looking up companies that owned vehicles, S1 filings, and high-end cars that seem to accrue tens of thousands of dollars of fines every year, I grew exhausted and demoralized by the project and it has sat on my back burner for a year now. If anyone is interested in taking this up while respecting the privacy of those involved, let me know how to contact you and I'll share my data.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...


The unfortunate reality is that parking tickets are just a cost of doing business in any dense city. When you have appointments to keep you simply can't circle the block until a parking space opens up. But that means businesses have to charge customers enough to cover the ticket cost, and then actually pay the tickets rather than letting them accumulate.


The unfortunate reality is that parking tickets are just a cost of doing business in any dense city.

Cost of doing business yes, but things tend to get a bit tricky when cities wholesale outsource their parking systems to private agencies that are harder to keep accountable than city departments[0]

[0] https://www.governing.com/columns/mgmt-insights/Chicago-Park...


As someone who has probably lost a day of each year roaming San Francisco looking for parking, I wholeheartedly agree with you that punitive measures are the only way to keep people from occupying limited parking spaces beyond certain limits. However, my qualm is with arbitrary citations like street sweeping, missing front license plates (some cars only have one on the back), and numerous other petty citations that the average tech worker has no problem paying off, while leaving the hospitality worker or small business owner in a state of bankruptcy after a single unlucky sequence of events.


Just another way the poor pay a higher "tax" percentage wise compared to more affluent.


Lately I've been looking for data sets like this. I was hoping to do an analysis of citations, related to race, related to race of arresting officer, all against the backdrop of the racial profile of the county/city.

I have my preconceived notions of what I'd find, but I think it'd be better to let the data speak for itself.

My email address is just philip at mccarty at gmail, and I would be happy to talk to you on phone/skype/zoom so you can see if you feel comfortable with me using the data for that purpose.

Or we could find a way to anonymize the data, as the personally identifying information isn't necessary for my analysis at all.


> He now does business under the same name, but in Utah. It is interesting to think of how much tax revenue the city actually lost by fining a small business out of existence, which was likely much greater than the total punitive fines levied against him.

I'm not so sure about that, due to the nature of his business (plumbing).

There will be two broad categories of taxes that will be lost when a business moves away from San Francisco.

1. Taxes that are paid by the business itself, and

2. Taxes paid by individual employees of that business, such as income taxes and sales taxes, if those employees move with the business.

I'm not too familiar with San Francisco business taxes, but a brief bit of searching suggests that the bulk of it is a gross receipts tax and business personal property tax.

A plumbing business leaving San Francisco doesn't change the amount of plumbing that needs to be done in San Francisco, so presumably money that would have went to his gross receipts had he stayed just ends up in the gross receipts of some other plumber. I don't know if the gross receipts tax is flat or progressive, but if it is then the city might actually collect more on gross receipts with him gone.

The city will lose out on business personal property tax because presumably much of that goes with the business when it moves to Utah. Whatever plumbers in San Francisco get the work that would have went to him might need to increase their business personal property some, but it probably won't be enough to offset what is lost. A smaller number of bigger plumbers are going to be more efficient in this regards than a larger number of smaller plumbers, so any consolidation should lower the total amount of business personal property.

For the individual taxes, there are two groups to consider. First, employees who leave rather than move with the business. These probably have little impact. They still pay sales and income taxes--they just get the money for that from their new employers.

Second, there are the employees who move with the business. Their income tax and sale tax is lost.

If the city was hitting them with $1k/month in fines, that's $12k/year. Googling tells me the city income tax is a flat 1.5%, and the sales tax is 0.25%.

Let's assume that these employees spend half their taxable income on things subject to sales tax. Then they need to be making about $740k aggregate taxable income for their income plus sale taxes to be more than the parking fines. By "taxable income" I mean whatever it is that San Francisco charges 1.5% on.


That sounds very interesting and is not something I had ever considered. Is there a reason you did not publish your findings anonymously?


I have been in contact with a journalist who offered to publish the findings in an appropriate manner, however the more I started digging the more I grew concerned over the ramifications of publishing the data. This thread, as well as recent events, motivated me to send a follow up email. My area of expertise is data science and I am looking for advice/mentorship from people experienced in responsible disclosure.


His concern was encroaching on individuals’ privacy. The author of such encroachment wasn’t their concern.


I’m pretty sure he’s talking about anonymizing the data.


It's difficult to anonymize anything involving locations and times


My concern was primarily that license plate numbers are included in the data, which I used to track vehicles across multiple citations. The license plate is also included in the towing dataset as well as the escheatment data published by SFMTA which links license plates to the name of the owner.


Can you bucket the data? Anyway, someone knowledgeable should contact you


Is there any protocol to have masked data similar to healthcare data?


I am actually the cofounder of a healthcare company that works with sensitive patient data (vitals, symptom reports, messaging between patients and doctors, lab results, etc). In the process I have found that even HIPAA is not a protocol, it is a largely unspecific set of guidelines for how patient data should be stored and transmitted. If we were to publish a dataset with anonymized patient information (e.g. the Framingham Heart Study) we could probably do so without any legal ramifications - there isn't much in HIPAA that explicitly prohibits or denies using data that has been stripped of PII. However we would never do such a thing since pretty much everyone in our industry is extremely risk-averse.

The only relevant guideline I found on parking citation data was that it is unlawful to look someone else up by their license plate. However, it is entirely possible for someone to do so without detection. My primary concerns, however, were ethical concerns - there were many people for whom you could determine their place of residence, place of work, and financial situation by their license plate's inclusion in these data sets.


> In the process I have found that even HIPAA is not a protocol, it is a largely unspecific set of guidelines for how patient data should be stored and transmitted.

Former HIPAA security officer here; to be abundandly clear, there _are_ very specific guidelines for which information must be anonymized.

I don't think you were saying the alternative, just sounded a little like "anything goes" which is definitely not the case.

As for your point about guidelines, that's entirely true - last time I read the section about encryption, it just specified "state of the art encryption" which is... a poor way to specify that.


I'm not sure the goal of this project but collecting criminal arrest information and making it public is not going to help anyone who's been wrongfully arrested, or anyone who's had their charge expunged. I'm fairly sure that storing and exposing this data improperly without respect to subsequent court actions is in violation of the law.


> is in violation of the law

It's not clear to me that this is true for all data about an arrest/charge.

Courts have upheld that arrest mugshots and fingerprints taken at jail intake time both can be retained by the law enforcement system even if the arrested person is exonerated (acquitted, charged dropped, etc).


Each jurisdiction differs on this dramatically. But the law enforcement system is quite different from some random GitHub repo.


I unaware of any legal authority one could use to remove public information from GitHub, even after expungement of the public record itself. These are not works covered under copyright that a DMCA takedown notice would apply to.

You’re still correct that datasets such as these might need to be globally distributed, instead of hosted with a single commercial provider.


Criminal records are owned by the jurisdiction which served the case. These are governed by state and federal laws. You are also subject to severe defamation lawsuits and anyone contributing to this repo can be held personally culpable. This is not about copyright.

EDIT I'm not going to do your legal homework for you, but this is South Carolina, for example. As stated above, each of the 50 United States has various laws and regulations with regards to arrest and criminal records. Violate those laws at your own risk, but if a lawyer is not being involved in this project on an ongoing basis, I highly recommend anyone to avoid: https://www.scjustice.org/criminal-records-come-back-haunt-e...

That's just about respecting expungement (30 day notice must takedown). If you improperly record or transcode the data from the scrape and that results in someone being attributed to something that the record never showed, you are subject to full weight of defamation lawsuits. If you unwittingly expose someone's private information that is involved in witness protection, for example, you can be subject to legal and civil penalties: https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-privacy-program/rules-and-...


Retained, sure, but publicly-disseminated in a PII database? There are laws about handling sensitive data like that.


There is also the need to not have secret arrests, so arrest records are public.


Each jurisdiction has very distinct regulations on this. It is not some trivial thing to handwave away. You are likely in violation of the law for retaining and publishing this info regardless of subsequent court actions. And anyone who is harmed by this info could rightfully sue you for defamation.


What law would be violated? What law would one use to infringe freedom of speech to continue to publish these records as a private citizen? Failing all else, one can host outside the jurisdiction.


Records can be expunged, sometimes automatically per plea agreements. And yet these records would live on in this dataset.


That has no impact on what a private citizen can publish. If someone assaulted someone 20 year ago but legally got the record expunged you are absolutely allowed to publish full page newspaper ads every day talking about the assault.


I agree that that is a very valid concern. I’d hope the data is anonymized (even though I recognize anonymized data is not perfect).


You are also opening yourself up to severe defamation lawsuits by publishing any information that is incorrect.


How would that claim work unless one is shown to have altered a public record provided by a court? I’d think such a claim would be dismissed upon as much as one review of discovery if it’s shown that you lawfully obtained the records and otherwise didn’t tamper with said records.

Edit: or am I thinking of libel?


It’s not always about flexing our rights when it comes at the expense of others. Sometimes it’s about treating others the way you would like to be treated. Even if you’re under no obligation to treat them kindly. Even if you’re entitled not to treat them kindly.

Surely there is a way to achieve the stated goal of the project without the collateral damage of exposing information that individuals might, for whatever reason, prefer not be published online.


Seeking accountability for those in positions of power, and those who abuse those positions of power, is not an activity I would define as flexing. It is our duty as both citizens and human beings.

I am sympathetic to minimizing collateral damage of the innocent, or even those without a chronic history of abuse (we should never be judged by the single worst day of our lives), but also believe in the vigorous application of sunlight on the nefarious.


That's pretty much what mugshots are. Companies already slurp up those mugshots and publish them and extort those arrested to pay to take them down.


Expect Github/Microsoft to crumble at the first, inevitable, court order to censor this material. This is derogatory data about members of among the most politically and legally powerful groups in the country. It's great to post this data there, but hopefully as only one node in a well distributed network of many clones.


Okay, so some PROBABLY BAD THINGS about this project. I'm 100% convinced that this group is an astroturfing project, but I don't know to what end.

1. This group believes that police officer names should be redacted from all police documents. They also think that Court case IDs should be redacted because it might be PII.

2. The owner of the group is accepting police officers into their ranks, and suggestions of inviting FBI agents and police commanders have been taken seriously. When I tried to point out that this was a bad idea, I was told I was "gaslighting" the group.

3. They have no legal representation. The closest they have (as of yesterday) is a legal researcher. This researcher is very green.

4. The creator of the group is a marketing expert who is a co-owner of a marketing company named frac.tl that specializes in making things go viral using emotional issues. While that in itself might not be a bad thing, it should make trusting this movement a bit more difficult.

5. The blog post that 'started' this had three different author names, and was recently changed two weeks ago. The 'current author' has told me that this is because the website editor was changed twice. Again, not something bad in itself, but combine it with everything..

6. The blog post that started this all is on lawsuit.org, which is owned by frac.tl. Instead of representing themselves as owners of frac.tl, the creators of this group represent themselves as lawsuit.org.

7. The owner of the group has given admin permissions to the group to people that she's never met. They have full rights to do whatever they want, including kick/ban/view email addresses.

FWIW, in the past 6mo, I've been heavily involved in police accountability work. Still new to it, but the folks that I've talked to who do this work more than I agree that this is a suspicious group.

If you want to support projects like this, please donate to your local police accountability groups instead!

Will post links in a bit.


Copy and pasting from a related reply within the group:

``` 1) There's been no decision on redactions. We're still standing up proj mgmt tools after 1000 members in 4 days, much less "this will be in it, this will be in it"

2) Someone else, not the owner, was largely advocating for police inclusion b/c of the impact of the data. Again, no decision made here about "no cops/yes cops"

3) Law professor is the legal lead, with about a team of 5+ researchers (mix of law students, etc.)

4) True. Marketing = bad, is that the point?

5) True. The author explained it to the T, there wasn't much there there.

6) Creator of the group is with frac.tl, the rest of the 'leadership team' has zero to do with it.

7) So what's the deal.... too centralized around the creator's professional group, or too dispersed management to people away from people that aren't in her group. ```


1: Your scraper must be anonymizing data that it gathers, removing identifiable information to prevent disclosure of names of arresting officers or cited citizens. https://github.com/Police-Data-Accessibility-Project/Police-...

5: It's still an SEO tactic that should raise flags. Here are the names of the past posters if anyone wants to dig:

Matt Meadows: https://web.archive.org/web/20191118214540/https://lawsuit.o...

Kristen: https://web.archive.org/web/20200527213804/https://lawsuit.o...

Ryan: https://web.archive.org/web/20200518181855/https://lawsuit.o...


That was built by a volunteer within the Slack on ~Day 2 as to give devs a target to start coding towards. It was paired with many public calls/disclaimers that no official words on the mission or final product would come before the next week once (1) was complete and input from the group was heard.


Why must officer names be anonymized? They are public servants and they are obligated to provide name and badge numbers during the course of their duty.

(Anonymizing citizens that were arrested/cited makes sense, of course)


I am a member of the project. Chaps spent all of 1 hour in our Slack server slinging accusations and gas lighting theories. The project has only been live for a week and believe me I will be the first to call to light anything that appears untoward. The founders and new leaders are operating in full daylight.


Any chance of finding open data/projects that are tied to organizations like the ACLU? Could the sad reality be we are at square one?

What’s the gold standard here?


I wonder if https://usafacts.org/ could get involved with this project?




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