St. Louis regional crime data - missing in action
In their presentations to my Leadership St. Louis class both city and county police chiefs complained about the inadequate coverage they get from the local media. Based on this I was posed a challenge - that they make their information available to the citizenry who is paying for these services. They suggested that this information was available so I went looking.
St. Louis City - yes their data is available and easily found with a link on their home page. However, the data is in difficult to aggregate/analyze PDF files. Moreover, the data is summarized into neighborhoods. In my ride along I saw that the police collects a great deal of information. Reports, stops, calls, arrests, accidents - lots more information than is available to the public.
St. Louis County - their data missing in action. No links on their home page. No information using a search from their site. County interactive map - no crime data. No official information found doing a Google search. It seems that the county is not making any information readily available to those who are paying for its services. To be fair, the Missouri Highway Patrol has a web site with crime statistics that includes St. Louis County. But the data accessible only through their query system and is aggregated by county.
The Post Dispatch has recently had a a few articles about the nature of crime statistics (for example here and here) because of the recent CQ Press release of its 15th annual ranking of U.S. cities by crime. The Post has published some graphs and maps of the St. Louis homicide rate (though the graph should have been done using a more informative format the interactive map is quite nice - see my examples of how this might look).
By not making their detailed data available to the public, the police departments are trying to control our access to and understanding of what they are doing. They seek to spin the story to their benefit. By being closed they are easily buffeted by press coverage - it is the press’s interpretation versus theirs. There is no way to look at the facts as shown in the data. So, by not being accessible, by not making their data easily available to the public for independent analysis their complaint about poor press coverage seem rather hollow.
Why would we want this information? Well what about looking at the response time to calls into the police? Or the resolution of individual complaints by block? Or the impact of sobriety checks on accidents? All things that would help the citizens understand the effectiveness of our police force. Take a look at how this sort of information is used in Chicago. Here we have information rather than data. A platform for understanding the distribution of crime and in helping the citizenry deal with it. A system of criminal network knowledge discovery. This sort of resource does not have to be, and probably should not be, created by the police. Rather the data should be made available to the community so that it may make unique uses of that information. As described in the Federal government’s guidelines for its departments’ web sites:
Visitors to federal public websites, and many web-based services, may want to manipulate data that is made public for their own purposes. New uses of your agency’s data may become a valuable public resource that would be out of the scope of your own website, such as helping to keep the public informed about the work of your agency and supporting civic education and participation. You should facilitate the public’s ability to make new uses of your data by providing it in open, machine–processable formats.
Government has gotten a bad name. There is a constant drone to reduce its size - to eliminate programs - to be lean and mean (though the code word is efficient rather than mean). Yet government is the word we use when we want to do something together. What we need is a transparent government. A government that provides all with access to the information about what we are doing together and how effectively (or not as the case may be) we are at doing it. Let’s start this in the St. Louis region by making our detailed crime data widely available.