January XX, 2023

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Below is a transcript. Please consider listening to our episodes as they are meant to be heard, not read. 

Archival:

The President of the United States.

Thank you everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody. Everybody please have a seat. Have a seat. It is good to be in Camden.

Sara Ganim:

In May of 2015-

Archival:

Now, we’ve launched a Police Data Initiative that’s helping Camden and other innovative cities use data to strengthen their work and hold themselves accountable by sharing it with the public.

Sara Ganim:

… shortly after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri-

Archival:

Moment is now for us to make these changes.

Sara Ganim:

… then president, Barack Obama, traveled to a city that at the time was synonymous with crime, Camden, New Jersey, and he announced something called the Police Data Initiative.

Archival:

We have a great opportunity for coming out of some great conflict and tragedy to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations so that everybody feels safer.

Generally speaking, police departments, sheriff’s departments, law enforcement offices around the country either don’t have good data collection or it’s just in a form that people can’t use.

Sara Ganim:

It was a simple idea with the potential for a big impact.

Archival:

This is an area where we think we can actually make real progress, is to help departments all across the country to put their data in a way that they can use, but also creates greater systems of accountability.

Sara Ganim:

The notion that better data on policing would ultimately improve transparency and accountability between police and citizens. But today, if you visit the website for the police data initiative, what you’ll find is…

Jim Birch:

Sadly it’s on life support, and I would say we’re probably planning the funeral service for it.

Sara Ganim:

This is Why Don’t We Know, the podcast about data deserts and missing information and the real life consequences of government secrecy. I’m Sara Ganim, and in this episode we’re looking at why data collection is so darn difficult. The police data initiative started off promising. After all, it had the backing of the President of the United States.

Jim Birch:

This was really a huge buildup.

Sara Ganim:

That’s Jim Birch. He’s a former Justice Department guy. Now the president of the National Police Foundation, which houses the police data initiative.

Jim Birch:

This was of course on the heels of what happened in Ferguson and what a lot of us think about Ferguson is that there were things that came out about what was going on in Ferguson for a long time prior to the death of Michael Brown that made people believe or understand that there was a lot about policing that we didn’t know. There was a lot about policing that people didn’t understand. How often do police officers use force? Who do they use force against? How many complaints are there in a year? What types of complaints are they? Who’s being stopped and for what reasons? And what’s the outcome? And so the president’s initiative and the team’s initiative as we understood it, was to cast light on that, right? To bring sunlight into that process, to make that data more accessible, more transparent, so that the communities that are receiving those activities or those services have the ability to better understand what’s actually happening.

Sara Ganim:

Right from the start, Birch told me that it was clear that there were going to be some cultural hurdles that needed to be overcome about what open data looks like for police agencies.

Jim Birch:

There were so many barriers early on. I think in hindsight now looking back, I think there was a lot of goodwill and good intention. There were a lot of agencies that were recruited at the front end of this initiative. Louisville Police Department is one example. Police departments and sheriff’s offices and places like Los Angeles is another. Certainly Camden, New Jersey. There’s a lot of goodwill and good intention, but I think what happened was as these agencies got into the process and we talked about open data, I think it was misinterpreted in a lot of ways to mean just accessible data. And what we were really tasked with doing at that point was convincing those agencies that what open data really means is not just that you’re releasing a PDF file, if you will, but that you’re releasing a data set that people in the community can have access and do something with.

And I’ll never forget one of the comments that we got from a police sergeant or a police lieutenant. I was explaining it to them, is in the same way that I just explained it to you, and his response was, “Why in the world would I ever want to do that”? He said, “What do you mean”? He said, “Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to give somebody access to data that they don’t understand, that they’re going to manipulate and then share back out with the media or with the community and create some misimpression about what actually happened”? And we said, “Well, let’s break this down. People are going to be using your data anyway and maybe they find things that you didn’t yourself find”. And we tried to convince them that there would be some helpful aspects to allowing the community to do this.

The one thing that made the biggest difference in getting agencies to kind of join in with making this data more accessible was an argument around open records. And so what we said to them is, look, by doing this, by putting this data out in an accessible way, now when you get that FOIA request or that open records request for all of your stops, instead of someone having to go back and reproducing that list, copying it for that request for the 40th time this week, you can now point back to this data set and say, “It’s publicly available. Here it is”. And that seemed to resonate with a lot of these folks that didn’t want to have to keep making the same data set available for each and every request that came in.

Sara Ganim:

Some agencies got on board, they started to understand the benefits and the number of agencies involved began ticking upward to about 130 police departments across the country. But participation remains voluntary. And with more than 18,000 police agencies in the United States, 130 is really not that big of a number. And it’s certainly not enough to use the police data initiative to see any big picture nationwide trends in policing.

Jim Birch:

I still get emails to this day from people who say, “Why isn’t my agency participating in the police data initiative”? And the truth is that it was always voluntary. A lot of agencies signed up very early on. I think you mentioned Camden, New Jersey is one that we got a lot of notes about because the president announced the police data initiative in Camden. But Camden never actually posted any data sets in the police data initiative. And that’s not uncommon. A lot of agencies said that they wanted to participate, but then when they would come to us and they would say, “Here’s a PDF file of the total number of arrests that we made in the last five years”, and we would say, “That’s not really useful data. You really need to provide something that’s more granular, something that’s disaggregated and gives the community the ability to do something with it”.

And a lot of agencies found that to be a heavy lift because they don’t have data systems that will support that kind of exporting, if you will. Or they don’t have the ability to easily pull out updates and update what’s publicly available. You have to remember that most police departments in the US have less than 25 officers. These are very small organizations. Many of them don’t even have their own IT staff. Their IT staff come from the town or the city that they’re in or the county. So they have to depend on another agency within the local government to make that data set available and to provide those updates. So they found it to be challenging, I think, and therefore a lot of agencies never really got to a place where they were releasing in a consistent way the kind of data that we wanted them to release.

The other problem that we ran into that became a little bit of the barrier was privacy concerns. And that one was interesting because there was sort of a conflict that developed between the police agencies that wanted to publish data sets that were available through open records requests. But many advocacy organizations had real problems with because they were afraid that those data sets would inadvertently release the names or locations of victims of sensitive crimes like domestic violence, sexual assault, and those kinds of things. So that is where we sort of found ourselves asking agencies to obscure exact locations and instead go to a hundred blocks or to do some other sort of a statistical technique that would obscure the location of some of those types of crimes. That was far beyond what many of the smaller agencies were capable of doing.

Sara Ganim:

Another challenge he told me was that police departments that did invest the time and money didn’t always see the kind of results that they had hoped for.

Jim Birch:

So we were hearing from police departments that participated in this, “Hey, we created this web interface so that people could access our data sets. We went to all this trouble to find this data, to clean it, to have a process to keep it updated. And we’ve looked back now after three or four months, no one has accessed the data, no one’s downloaded it. We’ve had some page visits, but we’ve had no downloading”. And so I really felt like that is a part of the police data initiative that was always missing, teaching agencies how to engage communities with this data and to hand the data over and encourage its use. So you had this kind of, if we build it, they will come mentality, but that just didn’t work.

Sara Ganim:

When the Obama administration ended, Birch told me that his team collectively held their breath thinking funding would surely seize up, but actually the money kept flowing during the early years of the Trump administration until one day Birch got that call to redirect the funding, which he blames less on political winds shifting and more on the failure of the initiative to make enough meaningful progress.

Jim Birch:

Yeah, I think sadly it’s on life support and I would say we’re probably planning the funeral service for it. It’s an initiative that is important to us. It’s one that we have maintained even without any funding. We still get agencies emailing us every week wanting to join, and we still have people asking us every week why their agency is not involved. So there’s a demand for this, and we believe that there’s a need for it. And so to date, we’ve managed to keep it alive. But I think at some point we have to ask ourselves, the question is, “Are we still doing a service by keeping it alive or is the number of broken links and outdated data sets creating more harm than it is helping”? And that’s kind of where we are today.

Sara Ganim:

This is not an isolated problem. There are lots of examples of difficulties collecting meaningful data. The US Justice Department’s statistics on crime, the place that we rely on to tell us things like murder rates are also voluntary and therefore widely considered to be questionable. In fact, in the most recent report, halfway through 2022, only about 60% of law enforcement agencies had reported statistics. Why Don’t We Know reporter Trey Ecker did some more research on this.

Trey Ecker:

For the past century, the FBI relied on this reporting system to gather national statistics on crime. There were a few issues with it though. For example, the old system had a hierarchy rule, meaning that when multiple crimes were committed in one incident, only the most severe crime would get reported.

Sara Ganim:

So I think that what you’re saying is that if there were a robbery committed in the course of a murder, that only the murder would get reported.

Trey Ecker:

Exactly.

Sara Ganim:

It sounds like for 90 years the data we’ve had on national crime has been skewed because of this hierarchy rule.

Trey Ecker:

Yeah, precisely. That is until last year when the new and improved reporting system called the National Incident-Based Reporting System, aka NIBRS came onto the scene full-time. NIBRS got rid of the hierarchy rule and gave a more granular view of crimes. For example, under NIBRS, the race and age of victims is reported if known. And there are expanded offense categories meant to include more modern crimes such as cyberstalking and drug smuggling. That’s great, right? The only issue is that despite being announced back in 2015, the agencies would have to switch over from the old system to the new one by January of 2021. It’s still completely voluntary, so there are still 44% of agencies that have failed to report any data as of June, 2022 when the last quarterly report was published.

On top of that, some of the largest cities in the nation are in that 44%, and they have yet to report data with NIBRS. San Francisco, for example, has said they aren’t planning on submitting theirs until at least 2025. That’s a big issue because in 2021, the old system was completely discontinued. So NIBRS is the only way we can collect national crime statistics. Another issue is that some law enforcement agencies have been hesitant to report with NIBRS because they think the pendulum has swung in the other direction. That NIBRS reports higher levels of crime as opposed to the old system, which underreported crime due to the hierarchy rule. To put this in perspective, if NIBRS had been implemented back in 2019, then there would’ve been an additional 765,000 crimes reported, which would’ve accounted for 11.6% of the crime that year. Yet under the old system, that wasn’t reported at all.

Sara Ganim:

So what this translates to are gaps in useful data like hate crimes.

Archival:

Hate crime reporting in our country is purely voluntary and hundreds of jurisdictions don’t participate.

88% of the agencies that are supposed to report hate crime data said they had zero incidents in 2016

Sara Ganim:

Or officer-involved shootings.

Archival:

The federal government, even to this day, does not collect comprehensive data on the number of people killed by police in this country.

Sara Ganim:

I point out those two data sets specifically because they are data sets that are often referenced, but ones where we are left to rely on non-governmental institutions to collect and track. And that shows that there is a need for this information. And this is not just a problem at the federal level, either at the state level, there have been failed attempts to collect data related to the criminal justice system too. Some of the endeavors were ambitious undertakings, but some were rather simple, stuff that you would really think wouldn’t be that hard to compile. In Utah, for example, there was an initiative to simply track the circumstances around every single instance where an officer fires a gun. Why Don’t We Know reporter, Hannah Himmelgreen took a deep dive into what happened.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

Utah is an interesting case study because it’s actually a relatively small state. It’s got about 3.3 million people, and there are only about 10 states that are smaller than that. So initially I thought data collection here might actually be easier than in many other places, and that too was a thinking of a guy named Scott Carver. Thanks for speaking with me today. I appreciate it.

Scott Carver:

Oh, happy to.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

Back in 2018, Scott was an undersheriff in Salt Lake City when he started noticing that officer-involved shootings in his county were on the rise.

Archival:

Newly released body camera video shows a deadly officer-involved shooting in Salt Lake and how one officer was wounded by another. Salt Lake police have released video of a shooting that happened Friday, September 4th, involving a young boy with autism.

Outrage tonight in Salt Lake City where police body cam videos show police officers shooting a 50-year-old black man, one with live bullets, another with a stun gun as he runs away.

Scott Carver:

We were having many more shootings than typical, if you can call any shooting typical, but the numbers were far exceeding what we had previously had.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

And then he gets a new job as Training Director for the State Attorney General’s office. He brings with him this idea to create an official tracker for police shootings across the state and the reason why each happened. He goes to his new boss, Attorney General Sean Reyes, and…

Scott Carver:

He agreed that that would be a worthwhile endeavor so I proceeded to gather the information.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

Information could help him improve training practices since that was his new job. There was already a database that the Salt Lake City Tribune kept, which unofficially tallied police shootings, but Carver said that felt deficient to him because it didn’t track why they happened.

Scott Carver:

That makes sense, and that’s very important to understand because every shooting by police is intensely investigated individually. There’s at least three, sometimes four different investigations that go on the same individual shooting to ensure that they were not, I won’t use the word appropriate because that’s not the term that is applied, but what the district attorney looks at is were they within law? Were they within policy? And was the shooting justified is a term that our county and district attorneys use here. So they are all individually looked at, reviewed, documented, and individual agencies such as the one I was with kept very good records, but there was not a collective database anywhere. So kind of when I started this, the first question was, well, how many have we had in the state? And there was no one who could answer that question

Hannah Himmelgreen:

And the reason why no one could answer, well, it’s pretty simple, high cost and little motivation

Scott Carver:

As you probably are well aware, data collection is very expensive and it has a requirement of very capable software and people to collect the data for the data, analyze the data, do whatever they’re going to do with the data, and that becomes extremely expensive. The other aspect of that is somebody’s got to want it. And so if the questions are not being asked, no one is going to be developing that database. And that’s kind of the situation that I found here. And in answer to that, well, why doesn’t that data exist in a collective form somewhere is no one had a need for it.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

No one had a need for it. When he said that, I was kind of taken aback because that’s honestly not what I expected. Maybe because I’ve grown up hearing countless stories of people, black people specifically being shot and killed by police. But to be fair, he did say that movements like the Black Lives Matter protest helped to get the ball rolling on his proposal to better study the issue. And at first things were looking really promising. He gathered the information he was seeking from almost every county in the state, all but one, Salt Lake County. Well, Salt Lake County is the largest county in the state, and the police departments there account for about 70% of the data he wanted. So it was crucial that he get it. But he got caught up in a blame game.

Scott Carver:

Salt Lake County law enforcement agencies developed a officer-involved shooting protocol, which is a policy about how the shootings are investigated by whom and what happens to the reports. Well, that policy itself was unclear as to who owns the report in the end. So when I made the request for the report from the Salt Lake County district attorney, his response was, “Well, they’re not my reports to release, you’ll have to go to the agencies”. The agencies said, “Well, we don’t have the reports because the protocol investigative team has the reports”, which is a third entity. So I go to those agencies for the reports and they say, “Well, they’re not our reports. They are the other agency’s report”. So you see the dilemma, no one claimed ownership of the reports.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

Eventually, the policy confusion was resolved, but Carver’s study was a one-man show. He had no help, and this roadblock really stalled him. He’s hoping he might be able to resume again after the pandemic.

Sara Ganim:

So, basically this is a really sad story of government red tape, right? Confusion, the lack of willpower to share information even within law enforcement. I mean, think about it, if these police agencies weren’t even willing to help one of their own collect this data, imagine being an outsider and trying to gather it.

Hannah Himmelgreen:

Yes, plus the need for this data is vital. It’s not just a nice thing to have. It could actually have a positive impact on thousands of people, not just people who are shot by police, but also it could positively impact law enforcement agencies who could use that information to improve their training techniques, thus keeping both officers and civilians safer. Moreover, it affects lawmakers ability to create comprehensive and effective policing laws. The fact is that you can’t make progress if you don’t have a concrete idea of what the issue is. Accurate data can paint that picture for us. Essentially, collecting and compiling data about police shootings would help rebuild a sense of trust between police and everyone else.

Sara Ganim:

Not to belabor the point here, but I’m going to share another example too. Five years ago in Florida, the Sarasota Herald Tribune did a big story about the lack of available information on sentencing statistics. Sentencing statistics would tell you things like whether the average white person convicted of a certain crime generally gets a lower sentence than the average person of color convicted of the same crime. Spoiler alert, the Herald Tribune story found that this was the case. So in response to the story in 2018, Florida State lawmakers commissioned an outside group called Measures for Justice to create an official database tracking this information. The organization was awarded a $1.1 million grant to get started by creating this data set in just two of the state’s 67 counties. They set a deadline to have it done by January of 2019, but here we are almost three years later, and there is still no such data set. Why Don’t We Know reporter Dana Cassidy explored what happened.

Dana Cassidy:

Basically, Measures for Justice ran into a bunch of the typical data collection problems and that kept them from being successful. Director of product strategy, Gipsy Escobar and I talked about this in September.

Gipsy Escobar:

So when the legislation came out, it was the most efficient criminal justice data transparency [inaudible 00:23:05] in the country, and he had quite an aggressive timeline at the outset.

Dana Cassidy:

Escobar said one roadblock was the number of different agencies involved and the difficulty wrangling data from all of them.

Gipsy Escobar:

Like I said, again, this was a groundbreaking legislation that had not been tried elsewhere. So I think one of the lessons learned was that the effort to implement will require more time.

Dana Cassidy:

Another problem was inconsistency.

Gipsy Escobar:

The law enforcement agency in Florida didn’t use a uniform arrest form. So each law enforcement agency was submitting data to the court clerks in different forms and with different content, which of course is two issues with the data.

Dana Cassidy:

State lawmakers actually amended Florida law to require a uniform arrest form.

Sara Ganim:

Measures for Justice is now also releasing a standard operating procedure for agencies across the state to make sure that everyone can upload data.

Gipsy Escobar:

And the pandemic hit, and then that added additional delay.

Dana Cassidy:

What makes it hard to collect the data sometimes?

Gipsy Escobar:

Sorry, how much time do you have? Because there are so many. So yes, technology is definitely one of them. A lot of agencies are still working… A few agents are actually still working on paper.

Dana Cassidy:

She told me one agency literally sent boxes of photocopied Steno pads.

Gipsy Escobar:

But even the ones that entered the digital age at some point, some of them are still working on very antiquated systems that are, I don’t know if you remember DOS, which was kind of like the prequel to Windows. So they’re still working on those very antiquated systems. And then there’s a problem with standards that each agency within each county, within each state in a way is following their own local standards in terms of what they collect, but also importantly, how they define the data elements they collect. The lack of standard decision and uniformity is also a huge challenge. And then lastly, if there’s also behavior and practices, a common problem we find is agencies overriding data.

Dana Cassidy:

Erasing or changing data, this is more common than you might think. In the criminal justice system. Cases evolve and change, sometimes drastically. Take the example of a DUI. If you’re arrested for a first defense DUI, you are really likely to enter a diversion program where the goal is to keep you out of the justice system by directing you to other resources with the promise of having your record wiped clean.

Gipsy Escobar:

Then once statutory diversion is successfully completed or the defendant failed, that same cell is basically erased and is written like… The outcome is written. So it might be a dismissal because the person completed, or it might be a guilty plea because they failed, but now we have no record of that diversion happening.

Dana Cassidy:

So a lot of cases that don’t rise to the level of felonies, the most serious crimes, can fall through the cracks. All of these roadblocks we know from other reporting that they are real challenges. But the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the FDLE in hopes that it will force the project to finish up saying, “FDLE despite many years and many millions of taxpayer funding failed to implement the database”.

Sara Ganim:

So, so far we’ve got a failure to collect data at the federal level with the Obama Police Data Initiative, a grassroots effort from within law enforcement to collect it at the state level that’s in Utah and a very well-funded and state-sanctioned effort in Florida that also failed. Is there anyone out there who can collect data?

Eddie Brown:

I, like many people was just scrolling through Reddit.

Sara Ganim:

Reddit, Reddit. If anyone can do its Reddit, right? That’s after the break. We couldn’t have made this podcast without research and reporting help from students at the University of Florida, you can help support them by making a donation to our student scholarship fund. You can find the information on our website at www.whydontweknow.org. Oh, and hey, have you checked out our social media content yet? We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and dare I say TikTok. Follow us for extra content like blog posts, behind the scenes stuff and other interesting things you don’t hear about in the podcast. You might have heard about movements that started on Reddit.

Archival:

A new generation of investors using their phones and communicating on Reddit are creating chaos on Wall Street.

Young investors on a Reddit website forum are looking to turn the tables on hedge fund operators betting the stock will go up.

Reddit is the latest social media platform to crack down on hate speech.

Eddie Brown:

I think last year, especially Reddit might have had a little bit of a bad rap as a place where people went to get their daily dose of what might be called rage porn, just high emotional content, whether that’s good or bad.

Sara Ganim:

You probably have not heard about Eddie Brown and the Reddit movement that he started.

Eddie Brown:

I like many people, was just scrolling through Reddit, reading stories, having suggested articles pop in front of me based on other things I’d clicked. And one of them was an article by Kristin Tynski who had gone to her local county court data and decided to scrape it.

It just so happens at my day job, I do a lot of market research and it’s sort of seeing if things already exist to make sure that companies and investors don’t launch into things that are already, like markets that are already met. And so I did some basic diligence and I’m like, I can’t believe this doesn’t exist already. So I reach out to people like the Stanford Policing Project, and I spoke with the leadership there and they laid out the problems and the challenges and I realized, oh, the nature of the problem here is there’s so much work to do that no reasonably sized group of people can begin to tackle it.

Sara Ganim:

Well, maybe except for Reddit.

Eddie Brown:

We’re dealing with the peak of the hype curve and all these folks are coming out of the woodwork asking to help. We realized that we had the opportunity to take a problem that could only be tackled at scale and essentially crowdsource it.

Sara Ganim:

I mean, that seems, I guess in theory, an easy thing. You get a lot of people who are very passionate about this topic on board and you tell them what to do. But I mean, there’s also the realities of crowdsourcing. Not everyone knows. You know where I’m going with this?

Eddie Brown:

Yes, yes. My joke is that human beings are a bunch of apes trying really hard to act like ants and we don’t do it very well. Fortunately, over the last 12 months, we’ve figured out how to do that. We’ve really in the last I would say month had a big pickup in productivity of our volunteers.

Sara Ganim:

So can you tell me, this may be technical, but how do you mine that publicly available information?

Eddie Brown:

Yeah, so the way Kristin did it for her article, which is available on Reddit, if you want to go back and take a look at it. The way she did it was to simply go to their website and then wrote a scraper that did the fiddly bits of trying to fill out all the forms online, that’s what the automation was, was to automatically fill out the form and request the next record and the next record or the next record.

Sara Ganim:

And when you say form, you’re meaning an open records request, whatever they may look like in a particular state-

Eddie Brown:

Exactly.

Sara Ganim:

… sometimes it’s called a FOIA, sometimes it’s called something else but it’s a public records request. And instead putting your name in a thousand times for a thousand police departments, she figured out how to write code that would do it automatically.

Eddie Brown:

Well, it was the first single police department. It was for a single county that she lived in. And the thing is, when you make that records request, it’s essentially a single, I don’t know, let’s say it’s a traffic violation. So you go in and you fill out all the information and that you want to have the publicly available information about that single traffic stop and then hit submit and it returns you that record. Well, that’s one traffic stop on one day for an entire county. That’s my numbing work that computers are actually really good at. Right. So let’s just have the computer fill out those blocks because we know that we just want the next ticket, the next ticket, the next ticket, the next ticket, and then see what we’ve got for the month. And that’s what Kristin did. So when we talk about a scraper, that’s what we mean.

Now, the scraper that Kristen wrote already presumed that she knew the URL to go to. So the URL being the website for the county in which she lived. And that’s where we’re at right now actually. We have an active bounty program in partnership with a company called DoltHub, and we are challenging people to go out and find us all the URLs for every law enforcement organization in the United States, and we’re starting with the URLs. So we’re trying to build a database of those URLs and then write scrapers against those so that we can essentially start to harvest this data through sort of crowdsourcing principles, but we’re incentivizing it through a small bounty program, something like, let’s say a quarter per field of information brought back to us. If you use a computer, you write the code correctly, it harvests well, you’re able to then bring it back to us and us to verify it, put in our database and kind of do their basic peer review diligence. You’re going to get a check for real money at the end of the month.

Sara Ganim:

What are you looking for? Are you looking for police misconduct records? Are you looking for every record in a police department?

Eddie Brown:

Every record. We want the data to speak for itself. So we as the board and then also as sort of the core group of volunteers that have been around for a while with our organization, we’ve had a lot of discussion about this and it’s difficult. There are issues of privacy, there’s issues of, well, why are we going to pay to store all of this when we only need these kinds of data to answer the questions in hand? And I think it really comes down to what is in the data itself. It’s a bit meta, but we want to know what information is being made publicly available, and whether it’s the right amount of information. Is it too little? Is it too much? There’s no standardization that we can find relatively speaking across any police departments. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe there should be some normalization. It’s a complicated question. But yes, we absolutely think that we want everything that any police department publicly makes available. We want that and we want to see what’s in it, and we want the public to have access to that in a way that is less onerous.

Sara Ganim:

Think of it like a police blotter. Eddie’s group is basically trying to create one big nationwide detailed list of every call that comes in and generates a report at a police department.

I’m just trying to make a visual comparison for people who maybe have never looked at a police log before. But back 15 years ago when I was a crime reporter in a small town, every day I’d walk into the police office and the clerk would hand me literally a list of everything that happened the day before-

Eddie Brown:

Yeah, the blotter.

Sara Ganim:

… in the last 24 hours. Exactly. The police blotter, right? And it would be date, location, or general location, and then very short description. Basically the category was all you got, like category burglary, category assaults, category DUI. Is that most of what you’re getting ba… Is that a pretty accurate description of what you say is publicly available on a URL somewhere? Is that mostly what you’re seeing?

Eddie Brown:

Yes. I think taking this from the, I guess the online environment back to, if we were to roll back the clock 40 years, what it would this effort look like? It would be people picking up the telephone, comparing blotters from town to town and trying to centralize it in one location.

Sara Ganim:

Are you successfully bringing back information that otherwise was not more easily accessible?

Eddie Brown:

I think in the juiciest coolest, like most lightning strike kind of way, the answer so far is no. We had some volunteers early on who… We are very fired up about employing FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act requests to bring back data that might be considered, I guess from a legal standpoint, publicly available, however, was not published anywhere, and so you have to request it. Those, generally speaking, came back unfulfilled. Almost 100% came back unfulfilled. Some police departments, clearly from our perspective, don’t want to share.

A lot of police departments are just in a position where they don’t have anybody to do this. I have talked to many police officers through the course of organizing this movement or this effort and asking them why are things the way they are and what’s been described to me as like underfunded departments struggling with the level of personnel. And then frankly, I mean, most coders aren’t police officers and don’t go into the police force. So they also don’t have in organically to their organization’s, people who know how to put out information effectively.

Sara Ganim:

There are a couple of other issues that they are likely to run into. For one, it’s very likely that many of their public records requests will be denied for being so broad, and even if they’re not, fulfilling those requests is likely to come with hefty labor costs.

If a person is on the other end physically having to respond to every FOIA that’s electronically filed it may become a point pretty quickly actually, where you’re just going to get denials like this is too much work. What’s been like the solution to that?

Eddie Brown:

Frankly, we don’t have one. Yeah.

Sara Ganim:

Okay.

Eddie Brown:

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s the right question to ask. There’s only two points of leverage when you’re talking about forcing someone to comply with a FOIA, and that’s a really good law firm and plenty of money to make sure that everybody gets paid and that we can pay for the services because as you’ve pointed out, in some instances, it can be thousands of dollars that are expected up front. I mean, one of the estimates that we got back on a FOIA request was 18 grand.

Sara Ganim:

Yeah, I mean, that actually seems kind of conservative to me because I’ve gotten bills for like $7,000 for much less.

Eddie Brown:

Absolutely.

Sara Ganim:

It’s too early to say whether this group, which is now a legitimate nonprofit called the Police State Accessibility Project, will actually have any long-term success. They got enough attention to get some free entrepreneurial advice, some pro bono legal work and enough funding to keep them moving forward.

Eddie Brown:

We’re finding a dearth of information, meaningful, emotionally free information, call it data if you want to use a more modern word. But where is this information on what’s actually happening? Where is the information on interactions between the police and different members of the public? What are those trends lines actually telling us? What is the truth as opposed to what is this hyper emotional, anecdotal video-based evidence that while true and very meaningful and indicative of the problem at hand, it’s not as helpful at drawing out trend lines and making sure that we don’t throw the baby out with bathwater, to use an old expression. And our organization, the Police State Accessibility Project is attempting to make this information available, so anyone who wants to know about police trend lines to include misconduct, but also the good news stories and areas of success are made available to the public.

Sara Ganim:

For Eddie, it’s about rebuilding trust between police and the public and doing it with something really simple, data, if he can get his hands on it. And by the way, that’s the same goal of everyone who is interviewed for this episode. From James Birch and Scott Carver, who are law enforcement officers to the state lawmakers in Florida, to Reddit users, not to mention other nonprofit groups. There’s one at Columbia and one at Stanford, both trying to use public records requests to get police misconduct records. They’re all in the same page about one thing. Better data is better for us, but they’re all running into the same problem. It’s really hard to get, and there’s a kind of irony here too that I can’t help but mention, many of these people and groups spending time trying to get these documents through public records requests are going to end up paying police departments thousands of dollars for documents so that we can all have better data that will ultimately benefit law enforcement, which is arguably their job in the first place. This is Why Don’t We Know.

This episode was written and produced by me, Sara Ganim, with additional reporting by Hannah Himmelgreen, Thomas Holton and Trey Ecker. The associate producer is Thomas Holton. Research was done by Kaylee Whidden and Brittany Suszan. Archival sound was collected by Audrey Mostek and Thomas Holton. This episode was edited by Amy Fu and James Sullivan at WUFT in Gainesville, Florida. The theme music for Why Don’t We Know was composed by Pete Readman. Audio mixing was done by James Sullivan. Why Don’t We Know is a production of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida. A special thanks to the Hearst Family Foundation for providing the grant money that supported this reporting. For more information, please visit our website at www.whydontweknow.org.

Transcript created by Rev.com