The Wisdom of Crowds
Citizen Crime Watch is far from being alone in seeing the need for citizens to have open access to crime information. A recent post by Matt McAlister makes the case as well as any we have made. Interestingly enough, McAlister finds the same deficiencies with the official police maps and public reporting systems in his community that we have identified with the New Orleans Police Department.
I then found the official San Francisco Police Department Crime Map. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats. The tool is burdened with legal trappings and strangely fails to acknowledge homicides. …
Somewhere in between raw data and overt campaigning is an interesting space. Data can help us learn and make more intelligent and informed decisions about how to manage and evolve our society and its rules.
Unfortunately, that space seems more difficult to find than it should be. I should be able to download data for myself or at least be able to visualize the stories behind the data in relevant pictures and charts. …
The Citizen Crime Watch site for New Orleans gets even closer to what I want to see. Similar to ChicagoCrime.org, they visualize with your standard data-on-a-map mashup, but the hover links point to coverage in the local media. I’m suddenly given a much more human window into the crime scene, and I can read about each event. …
The City needs make it easier for its residents to both report on things that matter to us and to collect the data, filter it, and act on it.
People will always want greater access to information. This is particularly true in communities where poor decision-making creates mistrust:
“Under pressure from constituents who say New Orleans police stonewall requests for crime data, the City Council’s criminal justice subcommittee took police representatives to task Wednesday, calling for a faster, freer flow of public information…When asked for a written breakdown of policy and procedures relating to the release of public information, Maj. Michael Sauter, the head of technology, told the council most of that information was ‘not meant for the public.’” …
Rick Klau has begun experimenting with this kind of thing in response to the Magnetix toy recall incident. He calls it “Open source parenting†and observes that bottom-up community-driven politics is likely to be more successful than anything a politician can enable:
“If the government is under-staffed and under-funded to help parents avoid harmful toys, then why can’t we help ourselves?…Give thousands of parents the tools to easily identify harmful products, leverage the community’s ability to provide visibility to legitimate threats while minimizing less serious risks, and quickly disseminate information that could be instrumental in avoiding a serious accident.â€
I’m suddenly wondering what role politicans will play if communities are able to form solutions to issues locally, nationally and internationally on their own. Maybe instead of legislators (or merely professional campaigners/marketers), politicians will become community managers.
I also start wondering what politicians do all day if they can’t sort out ways to curb violence in our neighborhoods. I don’t see why anyone living in this country or any other should have to worry about whether their child will be shot accidentally in his or her bedroom by stray AK47 bullets or intentionally while at school.
I’m convinced the answer is in the data that is already being collected in various government crime databases.
Commenting on McAlister’s post was Jon Udell, who identified what, outside of the United Kingdom’s Crime and Disorder Act of 1998, is the most innovative government data-sharing program in the country — raw operational data — including crime data — published on the Web for citizens to scrape and use to transform into the maps, reports, analysis, or whatever other transformations they find useful for solving problems.
Writing for InfoWorld, Udell described the DCStat program (which resembles precisely what we are so innovatively asking the NOPD to do — and eventually the entire City of New Orleans bureaucracy):
One of the speakers at InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum in New York last fall was Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat program in Washingon’s Office of the CTO. Earlier this month, he alerted me to a remarkable development. Starting in mid-June, the District of Columbia would begin releasing operational data from a variety of city agencies to the Internet in several XML formats, including RSS and Atom.
“Our expectation is that it will spawn mashups, analysis, and who knows what ripple effects,†Thomas wrote. “We also expect it will motivate government agencies to seek and sustain high levels of performance.â€
On June 12 the first of the feeds — data on the disposition of service requests received by the Mayor’s Call Center and the online Service Request Center — was quietly launched at the Center for Innovation and Reform. I immediately grabbed the data, and in a few hours I had cobbled together a proof-of-concept mashup that displays requests related to street repaving and gutter repair on a map of the District of Columbia. If you’ve ever visited Adrian Holovaty’s award-winning ChicagoCrime.org, you can see what this might mean for Washington.
Here’s a critical difference, though. Holovaty had to devote a considerable amount of effort to screen scraping the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM Web site in order to extract the data — and still more effort to geocode it. I’m sure that while he was writing that screen scraper he was mentally screaming: “Just give me the data!â€
DCStat is doing just that. The Atom and RSS feeds summarize activity, and all the details — including latitude and longitude — are included in DCStat’s own XML format. Following the initial launch of the service request feed, new ones will appear at roughly two-week intervals throughout the summer and fall. These feeds will contain raw operational data about crime, property, housing code enforcement, and business and liquor licensing.
Udell described the innovativeness of the DCStat program in his blog:
District of Columbia’s DCStat program rolled out last summer, I was delighted by the forward thinking involved. Publishing the city’s operational data directly to the web, for everyone to see and analyze, with the explicit goal of making the delivery of government services transparent and accountable, was and is an astonishingly bold move. And as Matt found when investigating crime in his neighborhood, it’s still part of the unevenly distributed future. …
Access to data is good, and access to data in useful formats is better, but these are only the first steps. We need to make interpretations of the data, compare and discuss those interpretations, and use them to inform policy advocacy.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this forum, the open source Web 2.0 revolution is changing the balance of power from stovepiped government organizations which conceal information, to citizens who now have the means to combine their group ideas and talents to transform raw data into new ways of understanding the world.
We need the New Orleans Police Department to catch criminals. We don’t need it to control the information about the crime occurring in our neighborhoods. The only solution to satisfy the public’s need to know, and to restore more confidence in, and cooperation with, the NOPD, is a crime incident data-sharing agreement with the NOPD.
We will create more useful and meaningful maps, reports, and alerts about crime in our neighborhoods, perform analyses to identify chronic problems and quality of life concerns, and come up with programs to strategically tackle the various problems which breed criminal behavior. The NOPD can’t win the fight against crime in our neighborhoods without our support. It’s our problem to solve. They’re our backup. We have to do this together. There’s no reason for the NOPD to block us from using whatever tools are available.
Futhermore, this isn’t just about access to crime data. It’s about access to all the forms of data which are needed to inform us about every aspect of every decision we have to make to rebuild New Orleans. The government is a purveyor of law, protection, and essential public services where the market fails. It shouldn’t be a barrier to information.
