Last night I attended a presentation at the University of Baltimore "Legal Hacker" event from Open Justice Baltimore concerning police oversight and open data. Stimulating ideas in the midst of a tempest of issues from corrupt public officials to lead poisoning to violence to information accessibility.
I won't try to capture the entire presentation and discussion (lots of views, and we had to leave early) but focus on some data topics I will try to assist with. The audience didn't need to be techies or lawyers; I'm the former and the meeting was in the UB Law School arena. Short background.
Image above via Jason Tashea on Twitter (cropped for effect) https://twitter.com/jtashea/status/1070462755512217600.
General twitter accounts related to this effort are @LegalHackBalt, @OpenJusticeBalt, and @BOvrsight; more specific accounts are out there.
The online locations of groups, code repositories and data structures, more or less:
To get my feet wet on the data architecture, given the case harvester project is not fully visible yet, I looked at the table documentation and drilled into the license plate data structure, where incident_license_plates looks like it might be pulled from a police report, and matching incident_id to license_plate_id. The latter points to a license_plates table, with scant fields:
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Several thoughts on this - (1) there could be more than one vehicle responding or involved in an incident, so it might be useful to know if one was the primary responder, backup, etc. (2) if an incident included vehicles but the license plate was not known (or illegible/redacted) what other identifiers might be helpful, and (3) while it seems as if 8 characters are adequate for typical DMV plates (number being a misnomer perhaps), there are special characters or images that might need to be recorded, as in vanity plates (not usual for police I suppose).
Another thread is whether a license plate might be only one indication of a specific vehicle, not to mention the records of who might be driving or a passenger. Typically, there are highly visible numbers placed on the vehicle roof or trunk to aid airborne units in directing traffic. Here's an example culled from Google Street Views (image (c) google):
Google removes license plate details from all vehicles generally before making the images public, though these roof numbers seems to be intact (though not totally readable).
Record dates would also be important to know, since these expire, are transferred, etc.
Some areas to consider should the municipal fleet data be public (other than through crowdsourcing):
I won't try to capture the entire presentation and discussion (lots of views, and we had to leave early) but focus on some data topics I will try to assist with. The audience didn't need to be techies or lawyers; I'm the former and the meeting was in the UB Law School arena. Short background.
Image above via Jason Tashea on Twitter (cropped for effect) https://twitter.com/jtashea/status/1070462755512217600.
General twitter accounts related to this effort are @LegalHackBalt, @OpenJusticeBalt, and @BOvrsight; more specific accounts are out there.
The online locations of groups, code repositories and data structures, more or less:
- https://openjusticebaltimore.org/
- https://github.com/openjusticebaltimore
- https://github.com/lucyparsons/OpenOversight
- https://disman.tl/oo-docs/tables/incident_license_plates.html
- https://www.projectcomport.org
- https://justicetech.info/tags/police-accountability/
To get my feet wet on the data architecture, given the case harvester project is not fully visible yet, I looked at the table documentation and drilled into the license plate data structure, where incident_license_plates looks like it might be pulled from a police report, and matching incident_id to license_plate_id. The latter points to a license_plates table, with scant fields:
Column Type Size Nulls Auto Default
id serial 10 √ nextval('license_plates_id_seq'::regclass)
number varchar 8 null
state varchar 2 √ null
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Several thoughts on this - (1) there could be more than one vehicle responding or involved in an incident, so it might be useful to know if one was the primary responder, backup, etc. (2) if an incident included vehicles but the license plate was not known (or illegible/redacted) what other identifiers might be helpful, and (3) while it seems as if 8 characters are adequate for typical DMV plates (number being a misnomer perhaps), there are special characters or images that might need to be recorded, as in vanity plates (not usual for police I suppose).
Another thread is whether a license plate might be only one indication of a specific vehicle, not to mention the records of who might be driving or a passenger. Typically, there are highly visible numbers placed on the vehicle roof or trunk to aid airborne units in directing traffic. Here's an example culled from Google Street Views (image (c) google):
Google removes license plate details from all vehicles generally before making the images public, though these roof numbers seems to be intact (though not totally readable).
Record dates would also be important to know, since these expire, are transferred, etc.
Some areas to consider should the municipal fleet data be public (other than through crowdsourcing):
- High speed pursuits are risky, and should be on the record. Witnesses to these might or might not note ID info. If cruisers had dash cams, do they also have GPS waypoints that might establish speeding trends?
- Vehicles not in motion for long periods might indicate problematic behavior, as recently discussed in social media.
- Red light camera records may show violations that need to be justified by pursuit, and thus on a public record.
- Likewise for speed camera violations.
- City asset tags/inventory numbers
- Vehicle service records
More to follow as I get up to speed, virtually.
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