Resources

The Database for Police Abolition (D4PA) is a database-in-progress tracking proposals under consideration by decision-makers that would: 1) Defund and disarm police departments, 2) Diminish the role of policing in communities, and 3) Empower alternative visions for public safety. The proposals are compatible with a view “towards the horizon of abolition,” and avoid contributing to the legitimacy of policing as an institution for community safety.

What military equipment has your local police, sheriff or game warden received from the Pentagon? Click the dropdown on this resource to select your state and start sifting through the newly released data from the U.S. Department of Defense’s 1033 program.

Every community in the US will be affected by COVID-19 – but the impacts will not be the same in each. This index identifies which communities may need the most support as coronavirus takes hold. Mapped to US census tract, county, and state levels, the CCVI helps inform COVID-19 planning and mitigation at a granular level.

This is a database of population information for US jails and prisons, as well as reported cases of COVID-19 within them. All data is gathered automatically and updated daily, or as soon as it is updated, for reports that are released with less frequency.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University has built the first nationwide database of evictions. Find out how many evictions happen in your community. Create custom maps, charts, and reports. Share facts with your neighbors and elected officials.

This tracker monitors government responses to the pandemic that affect civic freedoms and human rights, focusing on emergency laws.

Governments now use the ability to collect and analyze hundreds of data points everyday to automate many of their decisions, but does handing government decisions over to algorithms save time and money? Can algorithms be fairer or less biased than human decision making? Do they make us safer? Automation and artificial intelligence could improve the notorious inefficiencies of government, and it could exacerbate existing errors in the data being used to power it.

MuckRock and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL) have compiled a collection of algorithms used in communities across the country to automate government decision-making. They have also compiled policies and other guiding documents local governments use to make room for the future use of algorithms.

Through the last year and a half, MuckRock and Lucy Parsons Lab have used FOIA to investigate the use of surveillance equipment by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Through multiple FOIA requests and lawsuits, the team has demonstrated the CPD’s purchase and use of controversial “Stingray” cellphone surveillance devices among other new surveillance technologies. The work has also shown that Chicago Police have been acting in “bad faith” in fulfilling the FOIA requests. This project page gives preliminary data on the issue and asks for assistance in compiling more information.

As a first step in creating tools that center diverse groups of stakeholders in policing data analytics, Jared Knowles has built a prototype dashboard to interactively explore police arrest data across the United States.