An Analysis and Visualization of Best Practices for Police Data Transparency

The ability to hold police accountable for the actions of officers is contingent upon independent review of data surrounding misconduct. This research identifies gaps in information and useful features to build a guide for policing data collection and analysis for public accountability, based on the practices of other cities around the US. Our primary concern is to obtain actionable and transparent data on police activities and identify recording practices to serve Charlottesville as examples to follow. Prominent challenges include sourcing usable data, judging whether the data were comprehensive, and inconsistencies across datasets that prevented joining, and in turn, limited meaningful data analysis. Our guide also advises Charlottesville of the ethical and methodological considerations when analyzing policing data. The final guide includes: recommendations for sharing data with the public through dashboard visualization, which was informed by a multi-city scrub of open policing data portals; recommendations for feature variables to collect for meaningful analysis; and a multi-city proof-of-concept data dashboard.