With all due respect, you really need to be able to explain the goals in a sentence or two, and then follow up with a link to the pdf. An elevator pitch, a vision statement, a clearly written user statement, all would go a long ways towards explaining why this is a worth while use of ones time and energy.

I don't know whether the goal is to find bad cops who have been fired and get hired one town over and try to prevent those hirings? Or if the idea is to find people who have been arrested and ruin their lives? Or if the goal is simply to make the data available and let people use it for whatever they wish, from deepfakes to erotic fan fiction.

Data wants to be free. The data is the end goal. Public data should be public, etc all sound great. But, I've seen the mug shot database ruin people's lives, and eventually its founders had mugshots of their own.

Scraping and publishing is one thing, but knowing the goals is even more important because it would let me know why we're scraping, what we need to scrape, how to make that available, etc.

What problem are you trying to solve? And Why?

Police data is not easily searchable? Okay, so what? What good is it to make this available? What uses could it have? Even if the goal is just to build it and see how people use it, it would be helpful to know that.

I strongly suggest you consider working backwards. It's been 3 years. What does 3 years from now look like? What is the press release? How do you know you were successful, what does that mean?

Availability is nice. It could lead to transparency. That may lead to accountability. Is that the goal? Right now this data is hard to access. If you succeed it will be easier to access. And so what? What changes in the world could come because of this? If you fail, what lost opportunity do we mourn? You gotta have some sort of easily conveyed reason for doing this. If the data accessibility alone is the end goal, that's fine, not enough for me, but at least make that clear and convince me that's worth the effort.