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Show HN: I scraped local court records to find dirty cops

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114 pointskristintynski22 comments

You have to be careful about coming to fast conclusions based on these statistics. I can imagine these numbers being sucked up by various ill-informed political commentators to mislead the public on what police departments are doing. (Regardless, I love this work and would love to see it done nationwide!)

-It could be that some cops are assigned to densely white areas, while others must work in mostly black areas. This does not necessitate racism on behalf of the officers or management. (Perhaps it does in the overall local culture, as indicated by the self-segregation? To police an entire area, you must distribute resources to various portions of that area.) Racist cops might even prefer the dominant race of the area they work in, yet still mostly cite that dominant race, simply because there are so few disliked-race targets to look for.

-Certain violations cited to predominantly one race may simply indicate a reality in which people of that race break that law more often. This does not necessitate racist targeting on behalf of the officers. At that point, maybe a discussion about how seriously this law needs to be enforced should be had. Window tint? Dime bag of weed? Is that really such a big deal? (Ideally, these laws would just be removed. But politically this seems harder than using officer discretion.)

I agree with you, and that's why the officer names are redacted. Things we might at first glance think are because of biased/racist/sexist cops might have good explanations. That said, visualizing this data does surface outliers really well, and each outlier should be further investigated IMO.

It all starts with getting all this data into one place, scraped from the thousands of county court records sites. It's a big task, but this data is priceless.

Definitely agree, and hey this is really cool work. :) Wouldn't it be beautiful to have a nationwide map, where users could zoom to their county/city/town level, and immediately look at various outliers?

I'm beginning to think it might be the start to a more just society. Is that thinking this is bigger than it is? The implications just seem big to me. I don't think we are going to get privacy back, but if we can at least have transparency into things like policing, we stand a much better chance at holding our government accountable.

Dark window tinting is a nuisance to other drivers and poses a hazard at night (it limits what you will see when you look in your mirror.) I have no problem with it being enforced.

I definitely agree that you can't draw much of a conclusion from those numbers. They address some of the causes--some officers will be in areas with more of one race. This is even done deliberately as a supposedly race-friendly measure--assigning officers that match the predominant racial group of an area so they don't feel it's the white man imposing the law on them.

I can see other possible patterns, though--industrial area, expect to cite more men. Suburban area during working hours--expect a lot of soccer moms.

You should read The New Jim Crow.

Yeah and the perverse incentive here would be to avoid these kinds of stats by....not actually policing much.

I worked in this area for the state of MD at one of the foremost traffic records outfits in the US and have done this work previously, there are a few considerations you are leaving out which comes as a result of knowing these data.

You want to never look at things at the citation level, you should group it into stops. One driver can get many citations per stop, which confounds your findings..grouping can be done by making an ID of DL#+Date of stop. If time is included, put that on ONLY if it has the same time for all citation issued in the stop (like it is here in MD) - You could end here, or you could add an indication Y/N for whether a citation was issued. This way, you are looking at stops where at least 1 citation was issued, instead of 3 counts for a race off of one stop where three tickets were issued.

Also, the racial categories are based upon the DMV database, and what options they have permitted. The confounder here is racially ambiguous persons may be misclassified, while obviously black people etc will reliably be called such.

Additionally, you want to use something like the National Household Travel Survey to get an idea of the racial background of DRIVERS in the area you are examining. It is quite possible that an area has more drivers of a certain race. Note this still will not be perfect due to out of jurisdiction drivers.

Please contact me with any questions. Very interesting stuff, I just want to make sure you do it right.....if you hope to make any changes at the govt level, these considerations will be widely known in the traffic records sector.

This is SO useful. Thank you so much for the insights. I'm not 100% certain, but I think finding traffic stop data is pretty rare for most counties.

If citation data is all we have, by itself in its raw form is still important considering how locked away this data is currently.

I think there are a lot of smart people like yourself that would do in-depth analysis of even this messy data to pull out useful insights.

I'd be eager to get people like you involved if you had an interest. you can email me at:

Kristin - at - Frac.tl

That goes for anyone who has an interest in helping. :)

I plan do do this for many more counties. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence how difficult many are to scrape. This data often feels purposefully obfuscated. It only seems right to me that everyone should see local data aggregated like this. If police intent do use data to track the population, we should be able to track them as well.

I've wondered about creating a local, software based, "town watch" of sorts. Imagine many houses in the neighborhood running open source software and collating data about movements within the neighborhood. This could bring surveillance powers to the people, and it seems inevitable that this will eventually happen, but I wonder if it will be made illegal somehow.

Unfortunately, it seems more likely that people would use such data for stalking their crush rather than monitoring police or other worthy uses.

It is obfuscated. Right-wingers and other cop supporters have never liked the extent to which police abuse is the norm to ever be brought to light. Chicago PD is even looking to destroy misconduct records so that an officer with a history of misconduct can't have it used against him.

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/01/16/chicago-police-union...

Before you expand to more counties, please address the critiques here. Also note that these data are not homogeneous across jurisdictions. I like what you’re doing, but you need to be very careful about this analysis, or else it will just come off as uninformed by the people who work in this space. State public safety data is not uniformly collected.

You want to ensure you have all these caveats mentioned so that when it gains traction, you won’t waste as much time dealing with people who will try to invalidate your findings.

I'm much more interested in making this data open and complete and potentially close to live updating as possible.

I agree that it will take more depth to get at true patterns in the data, and there are many important considerations for data collection, cleaning, and analysis.

I hope to find some others who would like to work with me on this.

I sent you an email.

The only objection I can think of that an honest police department might have against this sort of analysis taking place is that some figures might be taken out of context or not adequately explained, such as officers’ numbers who patrol neighborhoods that are predominantly one ethnicity.

If I believe in my work, I don’t mind it scrutinized, and would welcome the analysis, given that the analyst is not excessively biased.

Think more evil-ly on the part of an invested party with a mission using the data in ways they want.

Imagine high-resolution evaluation of your work as a programmer by a nefarious party that is out to get you or your team.

> Imagine high-resolution evaluation of your work as a programmer by a nefarious party that is out to get you or your team.

Been there. I had to “make one commit a day” because I wasn’t committing as much as my peers. The next week of commits was me automating commit + Pr generation that only made changes to white space (plus normal work, which was mostly research at the time).

This seems like a promising way of detecting bias. However, I would be surprised if this type of analysis was permitted to continue without objections from police organisations.

It's a matter of public record, though I guess they could gripe about any data viz methodologies... still, we need this type of oversight.

It would be nice if the actual racial distribution of the population of the county is added for context. For a random visitor from the internets the lack of context hinders the ability to understand what implications the data has.

When 90% of the population is black the conclusions are different from when the population is 90% white.

Redacting data in your results is very close to the same as not publishing your results. Please do not redact critical information that allows people to validate or otherwise cross-check your results.

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