Citizen Crime Watch Blog

NOPD agrees to provide police reports to newspaper
by The Times-Picayune
Friday May 23, 2008, 8:01 PM

The New Orleans Police Department agreed Friday to make incident reports available after they are approved by a shift supervisor, settling a court dispute with The Times-Picayune over how long it should take before the public can see the reports.

The department had contended that the reports should be shielded from public view until they arrived at a records room in police headquarters, a process that can take two weeks.

The newspaper said the reports are public records as soon as they are written. Generally, an officer writes the reports before his or her shift is over.

State law says that initial incident reports are public records and it includes a list of details they are supposed to contain, such as the location of the crime and a description of what happened. Other documents, such as reports from detectives on the status of their investigations, are shielded from public view and the newspaper did not seek those in its suit.

Under the terms of the settlement, the Police Department is allowed to contend that some sensitive details of a police report may be exempt from public view. In those instances, the department must provide a copy of the document that omits those details.

The newspaper sued the department over a variety of public access issues April 18.

The Police Department agreed to comply with other public records requests from the newspaper, most of which sought crime statistics.

Under state law, the losing party in a public records dispute must pay the winner’s legal fees. As part of their deal, the newspaper and the Police Department agreed to try to resolve the question of what legal fees are owed to The Times-Picayune. If they cannot agree, the issue will be decided by Civil District Judge Kern Reese, who approved the settlement Friday.

Former cop is named public information officer
First day on job sees triple murder
The Times-Picayune
Saturday, April 26, 2008
By Brendan McCarthy

A former New Orleans police officer and television news manager was named Friday as the head of the NOPD’s public information office, which handles requests from the news media and private citizens for documents and interviews.

Bob Young replaces Sgt. Joe Narcisse, who will move to the department’s internal investigative unit. …

Police Superintendent Warren Riley said he is “infusing the office with someone with law enforcement and news experience.”

He said Young will continue to keep up “strong relations with members of the media.”

The shift comes as the public and the media continue to clamor for more police records and information. The Times-Picayune sued the NOPD last week for failing to honor several months-old public records requests, and several citizen advocates have complained that the department doesn’t release detailed enough information on crimes and law enforcement.

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EDITORIAL: Crime records are public
Friday, April 25, 2008

New Orleanians have found it very hard since Hurricane Katrina to get public information from the city’s Police Department — and that needs to change.

Residents, City Council members and civic and neighborhood groups concerned about crime — including this newspaper — have advocated for access to crime data that the department is legally required to provide.

But despite the public’s pleas and multiple efforts to work with the Police Department, Superintendent Warren Riley’s department has failed to give residents prompt and effective access to crime information.

“We can’t do some ‘pie-in-the-sky, give the citizens more information,’ ” is how Sgt. Joe Narcisse, a Police Department spokesman, put it in an interview last spring. That was after City Council members grilled police officials for not releasing timely and user-friendly data.

Unfortunately, Sgt. Narcisse’s statement seems to still embody the department’s thinking.

After months seeking some crime records, The Times-Picayune last week filed a lawsuit against the Police Department alleging that the department failed to provide public information sought in six written requests between Dec. 18 and March 4. The law requires public records to be made available for inspection within three days after a request is made.

The newspaper’s requests sought crime figures by police district, weekly reports produced in each district listing the location of various crimes, a homicide log and arrest statistics, among other information.

The suit also challenges the department’s policy that police reports become public records only after they are “finalized” — a process that can take weeks. Civil District Judge Kern Reese has set a hearing for May 23.

State law requires the prompt release of initial incident reports with information such as time and location, name of anyone arrested and a narrative description of the alleged offense. The courts should not let the Police Department get around that requirement by simply claiming that police reports have not been “finalized.”

The Police Department and the city have not publicly commented on the suit.

Filing a lawsuit is not a step this newspaper takes lightly. In hopes of avoiding the lawsuit, the newspaper’s attorney on April 14 alerted the city attorney’s office of The Times-Picayune’s intention to file suit. The public information requests were still unfulfilled when the paper went to court four days later.

New Orleanians have a right to the information sought by the newspaper. And a well-informed public would be more effective in helping the Police Department fight crime. People who know what’s happening in their neighborhoods are likely to be more alert to suspicious activity and to report it.

Other law enforcement agencies in the metro area provide effective and prompt access to crime information. There’s no reason why the New Orleans Police Department can’t do the same.

Related:

• Digital Democracy
• The Wisdom of Crowds
• Letter to Ray Nagin
• Letter to Warren Riley
• More Sunshine for New Orleans
• Citizens Can Do Better!

Newspaper sues over police files
by Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune
Friday April 18, 2008, 7:53 PM

The Times-Picayune filed a lawsuit Friday against the New Orleans Police Department, alleging that the department has failed to provide a long list of public records requested by the newspaper and routinely delays the release of initial incident reports intended to promptly inform the public about crime in the city.

The suit, filed in Civil District Court, outlines six written requests for records made between Dec. 18 and March 4 by two reporters and an editor at the paper in accordance with the Louisiana Public Records Act. The case has been allotted to Civil District Judge Kern Reese, and a hearing is set for May 23.

Among the items sought by the newspaper:

–Records showing the number of crimes committed in each police district.

–Reports produced weekly by each district showing where various major crimes were committed.

–A homicide log.

–Statistics on arrests.

To date, none of the requests has been fulfilled, the suit contends, though the law requires that records be made available for inspection within three business days.

“NOPD has failed to comply with the mandates of the Louisiana Public Records Act by failing to timely produce the requested records and has refused to comply with its statutory obligations under the Public Records Act in numerous other respects,” the lawsuit says.

In hopes of avoiding a lawsuit, The Times-Picayune’s attorney, Lori Mince, alerted the city attorney’s office on Monday of the newspaper’s intention to file suit.

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The New Orleans Police Departments’ neglect to report crime information in a useful manner to citizens was the reason why Citizen Crime Watch was created.

Now, a year later, The Times-Picayune has finally grasped the rationale, and gotten behind the notion that citizens ought to be informed, so that they can be engaged as extra eyes and ears on the street.

The NOPD can’t be all things at all times in all places. That’s why citizens need to be employed as an auxillary division of the police department.

Moreover, informed citizens are more likely to be aware of their surroundings and suspicious activity, and therefore, are less likely to become victims themselves.

Unless there’s a good cause to withhold information because doing so might jeopardize the capture of a suspect, or the safety of a witness or victim, the first responsibility of a law enforcement agency in protecting citizens ought to be timely reporting of crime activity so that citizens can protect themselves.

EDITORIAL: Armed with information
Monday, January 14, 2008

A year ago, frustrated New Orleans residents asked the New Orleans Police Department to improve the way that it provides information about crime. The City Council made the same request.

But the department still hasn’t done so.

Only the 8th District seems to release up-to-date information, and then only to selected entities. Meanwhile, there’s been no change in how the department as a whole provides public access to incident reports.

That lack of responsiveness is hard to understand, and it needs to change. Beyond the fact that the reports are public record, there’s much to be gained by increased openness. The Police Department needs the eyes and ears of the public, and residents who are aware of what’s going on in their neighborhoods are likely to be more alert to suspicious activity — and to report it.

Police officials frequently bemoan people’s unwillingness to come forward when they witness a crime, and that has been a persistent problem in New Orleans. But the Police Department could increase the number of witnesses to some crimes simply by making the public better informed. If people know what they are looking for, they are far more apt to spot it.

The department also would strengthen the bonds of trust between officers and the public by being more forthcoming, and that should be a goal of Superintendent Warren Riley. By contrast, making information hard to get can only erode public confidence.

People want to know what’s happening in their neighborhoods for obvious reasons: so they can take sensible precautions with their property and their families. If there’s a rash of burglaries, for example, people will make sure their doors and window are locked and that they keep lights on — and they’ll keep a closer eye on the homes of absent neighbors.

That’s even more critical for violent crime. What are people to think when the Police Department doesn’t cooperate with them in something so basic and so important?

Providing people with information is a far smarter strategy than leaving them to rely on rumors, which are often wrong and might even make crime seem worse than it really is.

Other law enforcement agencies in metro area provide prompt access to reports about criminal incidents, and the New Orleans Police Department should follow their example.

New Orleanians have demonstrated how passionate they are about making the city safe. Several thousand residents marched on City Hall a year ago to express their displeasure with the criminal justice system and the growing threat of violence in the city.

Moreover, since Hurricane Katrina a renewed spirit of civic activism has been evident. Neighborhood watch groups are on the increase, and residents are volunteering their time as court monitors.

The police should tap into that energy and treat the public as potential allies. That means arming them with information, not keeping them in the dark.

What Is Digital Democracy?

The term “digital democracy” has been used in recent years to describe the need to provide internet access to a broad population. I’m going to use the word in another sense — to describe the need for public agencies to provide access to digital information.

The ability of citizens to read and write in order to make informed decisions is a bedrock foundation of our democracy, but literacy of the written word to support a healthy democracy can’t be developed without books. In the same way, digital literacy to support a healthy democracy can’t be developed without meaningful digital content from our democratic institutions. The ability of citizens to understand and analyze digital information requires access to that information.

Where the 20th Century provided laws to grant public access to printed government documents, in the 21st Century, we need our government institutions to provide public access to digital government information. This is the kind of digital democracy I’m advocating — providing citizens with meaningful digital content in order to make informed decisions, and to unleash the creative problem-solving power of exposing that digital information to an open society.

Breaking the Miasma of 19th-Century Thinking

To public officials and medical professionals in mid-19th Century London, the cholera outbreak was caused by “miasma” — or, putrid air. Dr. John Snow broke with that conventional wisdom. He used government data on the locations of cholera incidents to show a common link to the contaminated water at the Soho Broad Street pump. City officials and medical professionals were convinced, the pump was shut down, and the epidemic was eradicated.

Dr. Snow knew what to do with the data once it was made available, but he had to get the data first. Who made that data available? It was a public statistician, William Farr. Despite his own belief in the “miasma” theory, Farr was nevertheless visionary enough to put his data about cholera incident locations into the public domain. Dr. Snow was then able to use Farr’s data to synergistically combine his knowledge of medical science and geography to solve a complicated problem. The rest, as they say, is history – except that it’s now 150 years later, and we’re still fighting for the right to public records.

The Dr. Snows of today’s world would probably ask for those records in the form of raw digital data. In his praise of the live data feeds of city services on the Washington, D.C. Web site, technology writer Jon Udell proclaimed, “Government is us, and its data is our data. Reflect it back to us, and good things will happen.” Transparency in the supply of data creates a more informed citizenry, and unleashes the creative potential of today’s Dr. Snows.

We’re going to need something like Dr. Snow’s breakthrough to help solve the crime problem in New Orleans. To be sure, crime mapping and reporting is just one part of the process of creating an informed citizenry capable of responding to the problem. We need the strength of a diversity of approaches and disciplines to get to the root of the problem. But none of it is possible without taking the first step of making criminal justice records as readily accessible as possible.

Digital Democracy as a Tool for Disaster Recovery

The various crises on a variety of fronts in post-Katrina New Orleans demand a broad government agenda of digital democracy. Ask yourself how the recovery might be improved if public agencies operated in a completely transparent environment — an environment in which you could see all of the raw operational data that they use to form their decisions and evaluate their own departments.

Wondering where your Road Home grant is stuck so you can decide how much longer you can hang on financially? Just look it up on a Web site to see who’s supposed to be handling it and when — or even the complete schedule of activities and appointments.

Wondering how a zoning variance or a building permit for a new development project might affect the quality of your neighborhood? Go online to see the plans for proposed developments.

Wondering how your insurance premiums compare to other people in your neighborhood? It would certainly put competitive pressure on insurance companies if they were required by law to publish this information online.

Wondering how many complaints have been made on a bar or corner store? Log on to a Web site to see the complaints.

Wondering how well the District Attorney’s office is performing? Find everything you need to know on a Web site that tracks acceptance rates, charges, court sections, and prosecutions.

I hope this is the kind of future which Mayor Ray Nagin was envisioning when he announced during his first inaugural address, “This future city government must be open and accessible to everyone. Its operations must be transparent and accountable. It communicates with the people in a clear and timely manner.” The hurricane may have set back those goals to some degree, but at least one recent event might signal that the mayor is getting back on track. How he responds moving forward will be the real test.

Time to Celebrate the Revolution

It was perhaps the last email I sent out in which I summoned that quote by Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The laughing is over, but with a victory on the horizon, the fight continues.

I think we’re now in the last phase of this struggle for better crime reporting from the NOPD. The goal of Citizen Crime Watch has been to secure from the NOPD more forthcoming and timely information about crime so that we as citizens can be made aware of emerging safety threats. The fundamental principle upon which this battle was being fought was open access to calls for service data, in order to facilitate dynamic collaborations between citizen crime mapping and reporting endeavors, academic researchers, and social service agencies.

Citizen Crime Watch persisted in its assessments of NOPD reporting methods. In response, some brass admitted their contempt for citizens by saying that the NOPD couldn’t just do “pie-in-the-sky, give the citizens more information.” But open access to raw crime data has been a mantra of Citizen Crime Watch.

It’s time to pause for a moment’s celebration. Finally, just last week, the NOPD announced new changes to its crime mapping Web site, including the ability to download raw data in an Excel spreadsheet format. I remain unimpressed with the functionality of the Web site (which is unavailable much of the time), but the data download is a very significant achievement, and a noteworthy development of which citizens should take note.

If it isn’t already apparent, a small revolution just occurred in the corridors of the NOPD and City Hall. They just entered the 21st Century. New Orleanians now have one of the most progressive and transparent crime reporting systems in the country. Whether they did it because they were compelled to, or did it because they finally came to understand the wisdom of doing it, that act alone was something for which Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Riley should be lauded.

The provision of raw data is an acknowledgement by the NOPD and City Hall that what private citizens can do on their own with information is potentially far more powerful than what the government alone can do. It’s also, by the way, perhaps an acknowledgement that citizens have a right to access the data.

Now, celebration over. There’s still work to do.

Moving Forward

The data provided in that Excel spreadsheet is less than perfect. This is the list of changes I’m going to be submitting to Chief Riley and Mayor Nagin:

1) The Data Is Too Old to Be of Practical Use

The Excel data is still too old to be of any practical use to citizens who want to be notified of crimes as soon as possible, not two weeks after a criminal has decided to operate in a different area. As I’ve repeated many times, the NOPD’s premise that approved police reports provide the most reliably accurate, rock-solid, FBI-reportable, official record of crime has some merit, but it certainly isn’t the most timely source of data. Calls for service data is currently the best way to get crime information to citizens within 24 hours of an incident. There is a tiny fraction of error in calls for service records, but it’s time the NOPD respected the fact that we’re all adults, and that we’re willing to understand and appreciate that small inaccuracy in exchange for the precious public safety value of timely information. Even when electronic police reports become available, there will be an unacceptable delay of days, or still weeks, before reports are approved so that the public can be informed of crime activity. We should encourage the NOPD to move swiftly to implement an electronic police report, but we should continue to request that Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Riley make available the highly useful calls for service data.

2) The Data Isn’t Functional

The Excel data contains two types of addresses. Intersections are fine – they can be mapped. The block number addresses, on the other hand, provide nothing but the street. Without the block number, there’s no way to know, for example, if a crime happened on Claiborne Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward, or Claiborne Avenue Uptown. A minor correction to include the block number in the Excel spreadsheets would fix this problem. The data fields provided are minimal — item number, date, crime type, partial address. There are probably other highly useful bits of information that should be furnished, as well, like suspect descriptions, time of incident, and — as Citizen Crime Watch has started to show — suspect arrests and docket information.

3) Is the Data Complete?

The NOPD still contends that unnamed “victim advocates” don’t want rapes reported in any manner whatsoever. Let me make the argument by presenting the yearly statistics for rape over the last few years: 2003 (213); 2004 (189); 2005 (44); 2006 (23); 1st quarter 2007 (14). According the The Times-Picayune, however – presumably the best informed recipient of crime information – there have only been 3 rapes so far in 2007. Anyone find a little skew in the reported numbers versus the historic trend? If they want to make the argument that victim advocates don’t want sexual assaults reported, I can find victim advocates who say that they should be reported — to make sure more people don’t become victims! The goal should be to respect the privacy of victims who don’t wish their identities to be revealed. That goal can be achieved by generalizing the location of an incident, or by reporting it at a higher level of aggregation than address — such as neighborhood area or police district — to conceal the identity of victims. These incidents need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Not reporting is simply not an option. So now the question arises, if the NOPD thinks it can arbitrarily pick and choose what it wants to report, is it hiding something else?

4) Why Not An RSS Feed?

This point will step into the realm of tech-geek territory, but while an Excel spreadsheet download is a good first step, it isn’t the best raw format. An industry standard has emerged in the last ten years called XML, and in the last few years, XML has been deployed as a live feed called RSS (Real Simple Syndication). RSS is a way of publishing raw data on the internet in a standard XML format. RSS to a programmer is like a fire hydrant to a fireman. You simply hook up your data hose to the data hydrant and out streams the live data you need for your maps, charts, graphs, or whatever other analysis you want to perform. It’s live, unfiltered data, available 24 hours a day. By contrast, an Excel spreadsheet is like filling buckets of water to put out a fire. In short, RSS is a more efficient means of moving data to the source where it’s needed, whether it’s a report, chart, or map. The city should explore the possibility of publishing crime data as an RSS feed.

We’re Only Limited by Our Own Imaginations

In what new ways can data be combined and analyzed to answer questions? Consider, for example, the fact that Citizen Crime Watch is now tracking crime incidents through arrest and court judgment. It has now emerged a mapping system which tracks the effectiveness of the criminal justice system from end-to-end.

We can now follow the prosecution of Audy Matterre for the June 9th murder of Albert Philips on the corner of Marais and Spain streets. Find the location of the incident, and jump right to the Orleans Parish Docket Master record which shows that Materre had outstanding warrants for attempted murder and armed robbery. Here’s a guy we definitely want to keep off the streets. Citizen Crime Watch will visually indicate on the map how Materre’s murder prosecution concludes.

This is using mapping and reporting not just as a tool to alert citizens of crime hot spots, but also to perform analysis, and monitor the effectiveness of the entire justice system — end-to-end criminal justice monitoring. And that’s just a start. There’s more to come.

One of the great advantages of showing that prosecutions can be tracked is demonstrating the need for data systems to be integrated into a whole — the NOPD records, with D.A.’s reocords, with court records, etc. The data systems of the entire criminal justice system need to be integrated. Significant resources have been allocated to the Orleans Parish Information Sharing and Integrated Systems project (OPISIS) to accomplish this task, but we should like to hear more from the NOPD about whether or not they’ll be able to modernize quickly enough to take advantage of those funding opportunities.

Using maps to report crime prosecutions appeared on a major stage at a Senate Jucidiciary Committee hearing in June, Senator Mary Landrieu presented a map displaying a single green dot representing the sole murder prosecution in 2006 among a sea of bloody red murder icons. Can there be any stronger symbol about how broken the system is? Sure, progress is being made, but public institutions need to be more forthcoming with the data we need to make informed decisions for ourselves about how effective those institutions are — that’s digital democracy.

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Anyone who’s unfortunately had to deal with the system to track a defendant’s case through the court system knows it to be a complicated, tedious, frustrating endeavor. What we’re all working toward is making it easier for the average citizen to understand at a glance how well — or how poorly — the system is functioning. But we also want to make it easy to drill down into the minutiae of any particular case for more details. Citizen Crime Watch will continue to make strides in the future in the effort to provide meaningful tools in the struggle to make New Orleans a safer city.

Thankfully, one resource makes the process of tracking criminal cases through the court system much easier. The Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office Docket Master Web site is an innovative tool which demonstrates how data systems can be created to better serve the public. The sheriff’s department has made the right decisions over the years to remove records from behind information barriers. Private citizens can, in turn, take that data and render it in mapping or reporting systems to provide a unique or added dimension of understanding. Placing data in the public domain exposes it to users who can leverage their talents to increase the value of the data.

Using data as a tool for justice was the goal of the “million-dollar blocks” concept, spearheaded by Dr. Laura Kurgen, the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University. With the encouragement of Nadiene Van Dyke, an outgoing aide to Councilman Carter, Dr. Kurgen was invited to present her findings of a months-long crime analysis investigation to the last Criminal Justice Committee meeting. Incorporating a broad array of data, including crime incidents, flood maps, and utilities data, Dr. Kurgen identified the shifting pattern of re-population and crime hot spots since Hurricane Katrina.

More importantly, Dr. Kurgen presented persuasive evidence of the intersection of poverty and race in concentrated geographic areas which produce prison populations. She identified the B.W. Cooper/Hoffman Triangle area of Central City as a “million-dollar block” neighborhood. If the more than one million dollars spent incarcerating people from that area were alternatively spent on jobs and investment, Dr. Kurgen suggested, people might be deterred from turning to lives of crime.

The presentation delivered by Dr. Kurgen is available for viewing on the Spatial Information Design Lab Web site. Additionally, this Saturday’s episode of WTUL’s Community Gumbo will broadcast Dr. Kurgen’s presentation.

I See that Cluster in the French Quarter, but Where’s the Rest of the Crime?

Unfortunately, one of the issues which made Dr. Kurgen’s research difficult was the lack of availability of crime data. I said that she used crime data, but she reported that she wasn’t able to obtain it from the NOPD. Instead, she used what she could get from The Times-Picayune, and yet (as we all know from the scant reports printed in the paper), even The Times-Picayune appears to be experiencing difficulty getting data from the NOPD in a timely manner. My conversations with reporters suggests that the NOPD hasn’t been forthcoming with anything but reports of the most violent crimes. I hope that isn’t true, but what else are we to conclude when, heretofore, it was easier to find out about a broken window in St. John Parish than a home invasion or a violent assault in New Orleans. Thanks to the NOPD’s new data download capabilities, I hope we’re finally turning the corner on crime reporting — but I emphasize — we need not just complete reporting, but timely reporting.

To look at the Citizen Crime Watch map lately, one might be led to believe that there isn’t much crime in New Orleans outside of the French Quarter, and a whole lot of murders in particular parts of the city. Of course, that isn’t accurate.

The primary sources of crime data at present are what can be obtained from stories in the pages of The Times-Picayune, from a smattering of incident reports graciously disseminated by district commanders, and the aforementioned (only partially-useful) Excel spreadsheets. It’s time to completely break down that information barrier and work towards a more meaningful open access solution.

As I’ve argued before, the goal of open access to crime data is one which doesn’t just benefit Citizen Crime Watch. Open access, as I have defined it, means that people like Dr. Kurgen, who are performing legitimate research on crime in New Orleans, should be able to access crime data without resistance from public officials. It means that if Times-Picayune reporter Brendan McCarthy wants to continue developing his murder maps, or if local blogger Da Po’ Boy wants to expand upon his murder cluster maps, they can expect to find that data readily available.

The solution which Citizen Crime Watch was working on was a data-sharing agreement between the city and a consortium of local academic institutions. Instead, commendably, the city and NOPD took a leap into the future. City officials are now moving in the right direction with downloadable Excel spreadsheets, but there’s more to do.

If you want to know what the future of digital democracy looks like, it looks like Washington, D.C., where virtually all of that city’s day-to-day operational data is published online in RSS feeds — including crime data. The DCStat program is the prototype of the future. It was to created to promote greater transparency in government, accountability, and citizen empowerment.

There’s no stopping free flows of information in an increasingly 21st century digital society. New Orleans is finally moving out of its antiquated 1970’s data systems modality. Public officials should seize the opportunity, now, to create the most innovative solutions possible. RSS feeds like what DCStat is doing are truly the way to go. One crime mapping professional has praised DCStat as “Justice XML.” It’s an idea that should start with the provision of crime data, but the need for open access to data extends to every realm of government – as the DCStat implementation has done.

More Open Information Produces Better Answers

The issue of greater government transparency was recently addressed — in an oblique fashion — by the Metropolitan Crime Commission. The MCC recently published a detailed analysis (pdf) of the New Orleans criminal justice system in the first quarter of 2007. The report concluded that the NOPD and courts have been focusing too much on municipal and traffic arrests, recommending that they focus their depleted resources on more serious offenses. Here’s another example of an organization which has taken on the serious challenge of compiling criminal justice data to draw conclusions about how to create a safer community.

Chief Riley responded to the Metropolitan Crime Commission’s study on WWL (mp3) by arguing that many of those arrests took serious offenders off of the street. I’m inclined to think that both the MCC and Chief Riley are right. In fact, Chief Riley has in the past produced counts of the numbers of violent offenders put behind bars thanks to traffic checkpoints, so where were the statistics to prove his policy is working this time?

I support the traffic stops policy – but only if there’s data to prove it’s working better than any alternative strategy. Once again, however, it’s up to private citizens in groups like the Metropolitan Crime Commission to draw conclusions from whatever data they can get their hands on. It is absolutely the right of private citizens do perform whatever analysis they can to evaluate the effectiveness of our public institutions. Reducing the flow of information only reduces the quality of the analysis. Wouldn’t our community be better served in the effort to identify the weak and strong points in the criminal justice system through greater cooperation and data sharing?

The Wisdom of (Smart) Crowds

It’s not just numbers of people that matter in a reform movement. It’s the diversity of the people in those numbers that matter. End-to-end justice requires the ability of citizens to monitor and evaluate every component of the criminal justice system.

Building a citizen-led reform movement recognizes that when citizens claim ownership of their communities, they can create powerful ripple effects that extend deep into the recesses of ineffectual agencies. More importantly, however, when a broad group of citizens become involved in a reform movement, they are strengthened by identifying among their members individuals who possess expertise in very particular realms. It’s not just more people that makes the difference — it’s more people who, in their diverse experiences, contribute their skills to the collective. There may not be just one approach that works. In fact, holistic reform requires that those who have different approaches work together to make sure that all of the pieces of the system that are broken fit back together.

I can’t leave this update without expressing the pleasure I’ve had of meeting a group of dedicated, experienced criminal justice attorneys who have been volunteering their time to start up a court watching program. They represent the model of what I have described as the skills diversity required for a citizen movement to succeed. Court Watch NOLA is trying to broaden its already broad base of support, and is currently sending volunteers into court rooms to monitor the day-to-day details of how well the entire criminal justice system is working. But it’s a daunting task that requires much more participation. Court Watch NOLA is looking for more volunteers. Consider giving your time to help: (504) 994-2694, or sign up at CourtWatchNOLA.org.

It’s citizen participation in every realm of post-Katrina reform which is making a difference, as Dr. Michael Cowan and Greg Rusovich celebrated in a recent WWL interview. In many cases, citizen-led reform movements provide public officials with the “clearance” they were seeking to do what they already knew was the right thing to do, but felt they couldn’t do because of bureaucratic opposition, or the fear of getting ahead of public sentiment. Whatever the effect of all of this citizen participation, one thing is abundantly clear to all of us in post-Katrina New Orleans: We’re going to do things differently than they were done before!

We are all of us, in each of our endeavors, private and collective, changing the course of history – for our city, and hopefully for our nation. This is a struggle for the heart of what we are as New Orleanians, as families, as neighbors, as Americans, as individual human beings with identities and values we want to preserve. I confidently believe that we are establishing here an example for how citizens will need to interact with the government to resolve the challenges of the future. It’s a difficult struggle, and at times, many of us feel beaten, bruised, and demoralized. But commingled with the frustration and tears are episodes of joy, celebration, and yes, remarkably, sometimes, even success.

We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go to create the kind of community we all desire, where fear is vanquished, justice prevails, and peace reins in the streets of New Orleans (except for, perhaps, that small bit of revelry we like to call Carnival season, or the occasional second line).

Let’s be sure to give credit where credit is due to Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Riley. They are making progress, and we’re making progress. They have been receptive to change, so let’s ask that they continue to work with us in creating the participatory governance model of the future, supported by policies and systems in support of digital democracy.

Please be safe, and continue to look out for your neighbors.

Cordially,
Brian Denzer
Citizen Crime Watch

http://citizencrimewatch.org/blog/?p=92

Mark Greenblatt, “A Numbers Game,” Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Journal, March/April 2007 (reprinted in The Gambit Weekly).

We began by requesting the most detailed incident-level data available in Houston for every crime committed in the city throughout the last three years. Each crime record we received contained information on the offense date, an incident number, offense code, police beat, census tract, city, county, time of offense, day of week, premise code and the address of the crime. We received the information on nearly 450,000 crimes in a plain-text file, which we imported into Microsoft Access.

To search for trends, we honed in on the offense code assigned to each incident. The offense code is a numerical description of a specific kind of recorded crime. We had to use the police department’s data dictionary to decipher what each code really referred to because the records track several hundred different kinds of crime.

My first question is, why can’t citizens and research institutions in New Orleans have access to this kind of data to perform analysis, and to be alerted in a timely manner to emerging public safety concerns?

We’re working on jumping through the hoops, but the progress has been slow in approving a data-sharing agreement. Caution on the part of public officials may be warranted, but those public officials who are reluctant to cooperate with citizens in furnishing more information about crime need to realize that post-Katrina New Orleans is a different place, and there are different attitudes. Citizens are more impatient than ever with bureaucratic delays in rebuilding their neighborhoods into safer, more liveable communities.

The analysis Greenblatt performed may not be rocket science, but it does require some professional education or experience. For this sort of work to be done on a regular basis, not just for a journal article, but for internal law enforcement purposes, to stay on top of shifting or emerging crime patterns, requires a dedicated vision, and full-time paid professionals.

The technology and science of crime mapping and analysis has matured in the last several years, but the New Orleans hasn’t kept up with those changes. There are two primary issues which continue to hinder the New Orleans Police Department in performing rich analysis of the data it collects every day.

1) The City of New Orleans has no vision for recruiting and retaining skilled technology professionals.

The Civil Service job descriptions and pay scales (the last time I checked) are 30 years old for skilled computer programmers, and non-existent for Geographic Information Systems developers.

I would recommend that the city focus on creating a program to modernize the way it recruits, retains, and provides opportunities for ongoing training of, technology professionals. The city should stop contracting out services to private vendors who do shoddy work at a high price, but instead, provide a career path for a core team of professionals which rewards them for innovation and valuable services provided to the city. An important component of such a program would be a review system tied to bonuses and promotions. Equally important, there should be compensated opportunities for further education in classrooms and conferences.

Technology changes every six months. Government needs to acknowledge and adjust to that reality. Moreover, for the purpose of enhancing the capacity of the NOPD to perform data analysis and supply rank-and-file officers with technology services support, the city should recruit and retain technology professionals with skills and experience specific to law enforcement. There’s a lot to learn about the particulars of how law enforcement data systems work (or should work). Technology professionals are force multipliers who can increase the effectiveness of every boot on the ground in a department rapidly diminishing in numbers.

2) The city has an antiquated records management system, and has yet to migrate the NOPD off of a paper police report system.

The ability to write reports directly to a records management system will reduce the delay in getting crucial information into a database for analysis from days or weeks, to just hours.

The city did hire out a contractor to write an electronic police report application to be used on NOPD laptops, but it isn’t now being used. What might be (generously) described as inappropriate planning for reality, the contractor developed the application to be used on a broadband wireless network — which didn’t exist.

There are other solutions which could have been envisioned, like transferring data from laptop to database using a USB thumb drive. The Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Jones, says that the city has purchased 400 new laptops which are being outfitted with Sprint broadband wireless cards to upload electronic police report data. It’s a bold vision, but the strategy merits scrutiny.

The average cost of a wireless contract, taking into consideration a bulk discount, would be about $50 a month per card. That’s $20,000 a month, or $240,000 a year. Projecting that cost over ten years, the cost will be $2,400,000. And that’s just the first 400 laptops. Scrutinizing the investment doesn’t mean that the strategy isn’t justified by the need, or that the city can’t afford it, but there are questions which should be asked. Were there were other options available? How are these decisions made? Would investments in improving the EarthLink network produce a satisfactory solution? Could the city build on the street camera wireless network for the same price to develop hotspots where reports could be uploaded? Would other common destinations for patrol units make logical sense to build wireless hotspots, at the Orleans Parish Prison, for example, or NOPD District stations? Would a simpler, less-costly solution be just as effective, such as using USB thumb drives.

Moreover, is there a strategy being developed to get those police report records out of the city’s antiquated AS/400 mainframe, with query interfaces and reporting capabilities that commanders and detectives can use in a meaningful way to perform custom analyses? The present method of getting data out of the mainframe is to write a request, and then to wait weeks or months for an old IBM greensheet printout (one wonders if there are still suppliers of that old paper stock). Try doing an analysis for patterns using a cumbersome paper printout sometime to see how impaired the NOPD is. This has got to change.

There are other areas where improvements need to be made. The NOPD data systems need to be integrated into one seamless whole with the Clerk of Court data systems, and Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff data systems, as well as other data systems of other law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan New Orleans area. Until these data system are more closely integrated, a complete picture of who the most violent repeat offenders are can’t be completed. There is quite a bit of talk between agencies to integrate, and citizens should feel optimistic that law enforcement agencies are moving in that direction, but there needs to be more public information provided about precisely what sort of planning and implementation is being considered.

In order to modernize it’s technological capabilities, the city needs to have decision makers on staff who understand technology, and who develop plans to take advantage of new technological opportunities. There’s always a cost-benefit analysis that should be performed, and budgetary constraints, but on balance, the technological investments based upon sound strategies and open planning processes will produce positive returns.

And once again — bringing this narrative around full circle — a vital component of a technological modernization strategy should be a public policy modernization strategy, to produce greater transparency, both in the decision-making process, and in furnishing records to citizens, to not only generate public confidence, but also, to create opportunities to foster innovation, ideas, research, and hopefully, solutions which will help in creating a better, safer city.

New Orleans needs a mission-to-the-moon strategy to modernize the way government functions. It doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just requires common sense, an awareness of how public attitudes in New Orleans have changed, and an understanding of how the world is changing technologically.

The extra daylight this week, thanks to the early arrival of Daylight Saving Time, is perhaps a fitting start to Sunshine Week:

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

Few things are as important to citizens as clear information transmitted to them about the safety of their neighborhoods. Irrespective of how well we may believe the various public officials in the criminal justice system are performing their duties, restoring confidence in the system demands that they be as open as possible with the data which citizens can use to measure their performance. More importantly, citizens have a fundamental human right to know about the emerging dangers in their neighborhoods. Transparency isn’t just a quaint concept when muggers and murderers may be lurking in our midsts looking for the next victim. Information saves lives!

Many people have been working very hard behind the scenes to obtain open access to the 911 calls for service records. I believe we should have access to the full array of criminal justice records through arrest and prosecution. As a first step, however, I am most concerned about obtaining access to the one fundamental data resource which would notify us about crime in our neighborhoods so that we can be aware of potential threats, be alert to possible offenders, and be in contact with the police when we see suspicious activity.

I envision the 911 calls for service data being processed in an online mapping and reporting system (e.g., citizencrimewatch.org). Various endeavors are actually now underway using an open source, team development approach — which means that the solutions developed can be shared with others, and other developers can build upon previous accomplishments. The added advantage is that the system can always be modified in response to the particular needs of citizens. A number of good ideas have already been offered, including a text message or email alert system, and an online dialog for citizens to enter a wide variety of nuisances like drug dealing activity, blighted housing, abandoned vehicles, and broken streetlamps. All of this really depends upon having a good source of data to start with.

Friday is Freedom of Information Day. Perhaps that would be a good time for all of us who care about the safety of our neighborhoods, for all of us who care about the need to know what public officials are hiding behind information barriers, to make a unified and public announcement about the need for city officials to supply citizens with the raw 911 data.

Time permitting, would an ad in The Times-Picayune be something people would like to consider? Or perhaps a letter to Superintendent Warren Riley and Mayor Ray Nagin officially requesting the data?

Who would get behind this gesture? What are your thoughts? Would we need more time?

In various community meetings over the last couple of weeks, some members of the New Orleans Police Department brass have made occasional, passing reference to the city’s new crime maps, accessible either through the City of NO Web site or NOPD.com. Actually navigating to the crime maps, however, requires quite a bit of guesswork and several clicks. Furthermore, given the lack of publicity they’re providing the new crime mapping resource, and after seeing the lack of meaningful information in the actual product, citizens might well wonder if the New Orleans Police Department really wants citizens to know about crime in their neighborhoods?

The NOPD continues to host the old static JPEG maps in its sidebar “NOPD Crime Maps” link, so you won’t find the new crime maps there. Note, as well, that the JPEG maps were updated on 1/26/07 — now almost two weeks ago. Does the NOPD not want citizens to find the new crime mapping Web site? Why not update the sidebar link so it takes users to the new maps? I suspect that, more than anything, the only reason why the sidebar link sends users to the old maps is because there’s no one at the NOPD who knows how, or who’s authorized, to update the hyperlink. There’s another story in there about why the NOPD can’t attract competent civilian technical support staff.

So how can citizens access the NOPD crime maps? You’re about to see how. First, you might want to freshen that cup of coffee, sit down, take a deep breath, and relax — prepare yourself to go through a mental roughride.

First of all, you have to understand that there’s no direct link to the new NOPD crime maps. There’s only one way into the portal, and users are several clicks removed from an actual crime map. The city paid an outside contractor to create a single portal for all mapping services — everything from property information, to permits, to drainage basin repairs, to day care centers, is accessible in a single Web page. It would be a noble and useful concept if the information provided wasn’t so completely meaningless.

I just looked up a street service-cut map and was returned a sea of blue dots inside a 2-mile-wide map, and a bunch of records below the map with no reference to the map other than a cross street address, and a status — either “completed” or “backfilled”. Moreover, the map simply doesn’t make any sense. Looking at the legend, the “completed” icon is supposed to be a beige square; the “backfilled” icon is supposed to be a red square. There’s no icon listed in the legend for a big fat blue circle. There is, however, an indication that polygons shaded blue are water areas. Is the map telling us that there are thousands of water breaks? I think not — it’s simply a poorly-developed product.

It’s interesting to note that there are no tools for navigating around the map — e.g., pan, zoom in, zoom out — and although the initial address search returns a lot address map at a comprehensible scale, all of the other maps are at such a small scale that it renders the maps meaningless. Users can change the search radius, but that doesn’t change the map scale, it just reduces the size of the circle, and the number of records returned and mapped.

This would be a mediocre start for the government, but the site wasn’t developed by the technologically-impaired city staff. It was developed by a private contractor. I think it’s fair to expect a better product from the private sector. Taxpayers certainly pay more for the expertise (ahem … they might like to know how much the contractor has paid in campaign contributions to Mayor Ray Nagin). The Web site is like getting the newspaper delivered to your doorstep, but it’s written in Swahili, and you don’t have a translation dictionary. Sure, the information’s being delivered, but you can’t make any sense of it.

Here, then, are the steps required to get to a crime map of your neighborhood:

1. Log on to the City of NO Web site and navigate to the NOPD Web site using the “Departments and Agencies” drop-down box in the left hand sidebar. Alternatively, log on to NOPD.com.
2. Once on the NOPD Web site, scroll almost to the bottom of the page. Look for the blue flag with yellow fleur de lis. Just below the flag graphic, there’s a hyperlinked sentence which reads, “Click this link to view real-time crime statistics and other information in your area by typing an address.” The message is more than just a little deceiving, as you’ll soon discover, because the crime page is anything but “real-time” or “statistical.”
3. Upon clicking the hyperlink and then acknowleding a pop-up disclaimer window, you should find yourself on an address search page featuring a clunky interface which requires that the user enter separately the various elements of an address, and which doesn’t allow any intersections or free-form address entry with intelligent fuzzy matching like Google maps allows.
4. For the purposes of this exercise, I chose 1725 Tulane Avenue, the site of the Wednesday four-alarm fire at the Economy Lodge.
5. After the lot boundary map for the address is finished rendering, you’ll have to choose “NOPD” from the “City Services” drop-down box in the toolbar located below the banner.

Here’s the result:

The first thing you might notice is that all of the icons look exactly the same. There’s no differentiation to represent different crime types. The scale of the map makes it difficult to discern street names. There’s also a long list of thefts listed in the records displayed below the map. It isn’t until scrolling to the third page that more serious crimes can be found. The records are stale — at least two-weeks old. Again, changing the search radius from 1 mile to 0.1 mile doesn’t change the map scale; it just reduces the size of the search radius circle, and the number of records returned. There’s no logical sort order to the records, although there is a sort button at the top of only two fields displayed — crime type and date — but there’s no way, for example, to sort all robberies by date. It’s critical to note the gross oversight — or negligence — in displaying only five crime categories: assault, auto theft, burglary, robbery, theft. Fortunately, we live in a city where (at least according to the NOPD map) there’s no murder! Shootings? Rapes? How would we know that a particular pair of juveniles were recently terrorizing kids by trying to steal their bikes? How would we know that there’s been a rash of shootings around a particular bar? Presumably, the shootings, rapes, other violent crimes (and perhaps even murder) are all aggregated in the “assault” category, but there’s no documentation or legend to indicate that fact. This isn’t much better than the older static JPEG maps. At least the older maps somewhat differentiated among crime types, and displayed more crime types. In fact, the new NOPD crime maps are still just dumb JPEG images. They aren’t at all interactive. It’s ten-year-old technology in an interactive Web 2.0 universe. Overall, the new NOPD crime mapping system is almost — almost — a completely meaningless product. Maybe that’s why the city isn’t eager to advertise the Web site.

I have to applaud the city for trying, because the result only underscores the need to allow citizens to develop their own crime mapping and reporting services in an open access, open source, team development environment. Why reward contractors (who pay dividends to politicians) when citizens can do a better job?! Of course, the answer is revealed in the question. I say allow the market to truly decide who can provide the best reporting and mapping services. Make the crime data available to any responsible party which wishes to develop services for the community. Ultimately, I’m confident that the best approach will prove to be one where the large pool of talented volunteers around New Orleans develop the solutions that work best for their neighborhoods. In an open source environment, better solutions can be developed on the achievements of others. Groups have already coalesced around this idea, pressed on by a broken criminal justice system which isn’t “getting it” — that we want more information! No one knows better than we do how information saves lives!

Public officials in the criminal justice system leave citizens little reason to trust that they’re doing the right thing. It’s time for a radical change. Citizens are always being told that the criminal justice system can’t solve the crime problem without citizen participation. It’s time for the criminal justice system to practice what it preaches by listening to citizens who are demanding greater transparency. Let’s find out where the crime hot spots are by requiring the NOPD to furnish open access to the raw 911 calls for service data. Let’s find out where the problems really are in the criminal justice system by giving us open access to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office Docketmaster records. The objections to releasing the records on privacy grounds can be eliminated by scrubbing specific victim information from the records and by averaging victim addresses. Citizens can, and will, act responsibly in their own best interest, and in the best interest of their neighborhoods, when they are entrusted with the information they need in order to own and fix the problems in their neighborhoods.

When citizens have the information they need to evaluate the safety of their own neighborhoods in a timely manner — not two weeks after criminals have left — the beleagured NOPD will secure the aid of tens or hundreds of thousands of additional eyes on the watch for perpetrators. More importantly, they can be alerted to emerging dangers in their neighborhoods. When citizens understand better the particular weak links in the system of prosecuting offenders, they can make intelligent decisions about how to correct the system.

It’s time for citizens to take a front-seat in driving criminal justice reform. The first key to unlocking the problems in that system is open access to data. The old ways of solving problems aren’t working. It will be a difficult and painful process, especially for the public officials who are hiding their deficiencies behind information barriers. Those who don’t answer the public call for open access to information are living in the past, which is exactly where we should leave them.

Citizens can do better! Public officials need to either support us, or get out of the way!