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Comment by comrh | Hacker News Reader

Awesome. Did the police department release this data willingly or from a FOIA request? I've been trying to get this exact type of data from local police departments but I've never seen it with Lat/Longs and clearance.

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The Seattle PD is very open about their data. Every single beat has it's own twitter stream of dispatches (delayed by an hour, for obvious security reasons): http://www.seattle.gov/police/tweets/

Whenever I hear a bunch of sirens driving by, it's great to know that in short order I'll see what was happening in my Twitter feed.

It's interesting that they delay the Twitter by an hour. You can get real time 911 info for Seattle here.

http://www2.seattle.gov/fire/realtime911/getRecsForDatePub.a...

afaict from checking that site for years, that's only fire department responders, not police.

Holy crap. Wow I have a serious respect for the Seattle PD now, that is very open.

edit: I found out why that one is real time. It isn't Seattle PD but Seattle Fire. (https://twitter.com/SeattlePD/status/502651325117526016)

You can find some data of mixed completeness/usefulness here[1]. Data.gov has gotten much better in terms of usability over the past few years, but it's still a crapshoot, and it's generally more effective to go directly to the agency/organization that you want data from/about. I think it's a great idea though, and I hope it's not the sort of thing that will get neglected or die if there's a party change at the White House level (although I suspect that could easily happen).

[1] http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?q=police&sort=score+desc%2C+...

Hi comrh, Seattle has been really great at releasing data. Not sure whether or not it came from a FOIA request, but I know from working with Joy Bonaguro (Chief Data Officer of San Francisco) that SF has been working with the police department as well to release as much data as possible in leveraging data science to help fight crime.

The data from Seattle is located here: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Seattle-Police-Depart...

The data from San Francisco is located here: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/SFPD-Reported-Incidents...

I wholeheartedly agree that police data should be available from all cities / counties with the type of detail that SF and Seattle show. Open Data Standards are still not where they need to be. If you're interested in helping civic organizations get there, shoot me a message -- we're actively working with Federal and municipal governments on this.

http://data.seattle.gov is powered by Socrata. Here is a list of cities that they support: https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset/Socrata-Customer-Spotli...

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