It’s the algorithms in government that need to be brought out to the light of day, not the data,” he says. “What I worry about are the de facto laws that are being coded in software without public scrutiny.
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Upping the numbers game in Oakland PD
There is a lot of public pressure and public expectation in Oakland these days as a result of the increased oversight and monitoring of our police department. The public has been promised much in the way of reforms, better service, smarter policing, something about community policing (but noone is quite sure what that means), better management (by having multiple people in charge presumably?) and a safer city overall. All the high powered, well compensated experts and consultants in town come with varied baggage and success and all have something important to offer this city. There is one thing that does seem to unify them all (Frazier, Wasserman, Bratton): data. They all talk up the importance of having and using good data. Data to drive geographic policing or hotspot policing, data for investigations, data for tracking processes and data to spot trends and patterns.
We’ve had some version of the popular model of CompStat in Oakland for a few years now, Batts implemented it when we were still contracting for him to do crime analysis. Every city does it differently, as they should, and every city understands it slightly differently. If you still see that word and think it means a computer system or program then please consider yourself corrected- it’s not a program, a piece of software, despite its name. It’s a method, a process. You could do it with pen and paper if you were a genius. Most of us prefer computers however. When things get tight in any city or company you have two options commonly considered- do much less, or try to be smarter and do more with less. Sure there are other options, but this is a blog, not a PhD. With ~635 sworn officers Oakland has to get smarter. CompStat approaches can help but they are not THE answer. (Given this post was drafted a week ago, new today from Bratton’s report is important context for this: “The city’s Compstat process was more of a "presentation by a captain than a system of vigorous strategic oversight.”“ Source)
There is a fascinating battle raging (perhaps that’s overdramatic- but it’s saturday and I have a good beer open), between some respected academics overtheir opinions/statements on the validity of things like the actual impact of CompStat and other policing strategies, especially from NYCPD. New York is a favorite because of the huge size and corresponding huge samples in data availability, it’s massive drop in crime counts over 20 years and it’s scandals and successes.
When we move to a model where our police department is truly/heavily data driven (no I do not believe it is this way currently) we must be aware of the good and the bad of this approach, and more importantly be aware of the ways this approach can be abused. Trust in police in Oakland is incredibly low and this is sad, wrong, broken, disgusting etc etc. On all angles. There is much to do to repair this and I propose that we must, it’s not an ok thing to maintain the status quo here. But with more numbers involved, better reporting and better analysis and communication of these data (that’s the plan right?) comes an increase in the types of activities that have sullied new York City’s reputation and cast valid doubts over the veracity of the crime reduction facts touted there.
Whenever there is a major change in policy or practice we should, as a smart society, be evaluating the impact of these changes. Better sign-up process for food stamps online? You should see an uptake in enrollment – if not you’re missing something. That kind of simple evaluation. Change the police reporting for multiple types of basic crimes including burglaries so people can only report them online now and no officer will show? You should be providing solid numbers to the public and the city administration on the trends in all those crimes as well as numbers on closure and conviction for those crimes. Things don’t stop at a report- if your reports go up, are you finding more people, less, no change? Any answer means something and should be critically be considered to see what it tells us.
When OPD ramps up it’s technology (Oh God let it be soon) and data use and builds its capacity for dynamic use of CompStat methods we will need to be ever more vigilant of the types of manipulation that have been documented in New York City. Eterno & Silverman have a book in print that does a stunning job of documenting the abuses of the NYCPD to manipulate the numbers used in the CompStat program, it’s expensive, sorry. It provides what to me are the most comprehensive and broad analytical assessments of the claims of crime reduction in New York City and shows them to be fraudulent and false overall. Knowing the kinds of improbable realities they describe should position Oakland’s city staff and our community well to judge if these things begin to occur in Oakland. For example, if we hear claims of reduction in assaults by 50%, yet our hospitalization reports increase by 90% we should be asking what the hell is going on. Crime data are in my experience the most manipulated and most misleading figures in common use. Pressure from senior officers to suppress major crime statistics is something that will erode the remaining trust in OPD and will not have a positive impact on crime and violence prevention in our city.
If you want to see more of the critique of Zimring’s ideas that are quite relevant to Oakland check out this brief -then buy the book 😉
In our backyard. Girls as young as 10 are kidnapped, raped, abused, beaten and enslaved to serve the needs of evil men in our community. Yet there is no outrage. OPD alone cannot fix this. Join us to rid our city and country of human…
Love some rooster sauce love.http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/02/the-sriracha-food-pyramid-diet/
Join us to help ReWrite Oakland – city information shouldn’t be a nightmare to find – we need you to help us make our city more open and accessible for all!
Oakland Hot Spot: “Yeah, I’d shoot ’em…”
When Ben McBride first started trying to understand Oakland’s violence he spent some time with kids who were deeply involved in it. This was around 2006, when Oakland had over 140 murders. McBride wasn’t living in Oakland then.
“I met one young guy and I asked him, because I was really…
Opening Oakland’s Budget
Today a group of Oakland’s civic hackers (the good guys) launched a powerful and simple new tool into the newly announced city budget debate: OpenBudgetOakland.org is an app that allows you to easily dive into different allocations and departments to see just where all the money goes! It’s rad, seriously, it’s something every single resident will be able to learn something new from and almost certainly will raise a few eyebrows about how our city is doing. The team who built this, primarily Shawn McDougal and Adam Stiles did a fantastic job of also building in a conversation feature that allows users to ask questions and to discuss every single line item of the city budget- the new one proposed today and the past one. And not a single ugly PDF in sight, just clear web graphics you can understand!
It’s a great demonstration of how open data (easily accessible public records), civic hacking (building solutions to city issues fast & cheap) and engaged citizens all fit together to create something awesome. The team and some of OpenOakland’s other members worked hard to complete the app and launch it in time for the Mayor’s press conference today that would announce the new budget proposal for 2013-2015. We had hoped the city would publish the new budget data earlier this week but no luck. Then around noon today the city did some great work to actually get the new budget numbers published on their data site, creating a frenzy of coding and data processing as this team actually built the new visualization tools for the proposed budget and had it live and tested in about six hours. 6. I’m impressed. I hope you are too. So in a single day the new budget is announced and we already have a great platform to explore the budget nuances, to discuss the implications and to ask informed questions and to share knowledge for those who really know this finance game.
I’m particularly excited about this launch as the Open Budget Oakland team are the first group/app to be accepted into OpenOakland as a formally supported project. We’ve been deliberating for a few months on how city staff, citizens and developers can come up with a new idea or a new app and have it become part of our official set of projects, and now we have that process nailed down (to be published this weekend!).
In small part this successful launch illustrates a major reason behind the creation of OpenOakland: sustaining civic hacking. Not just as a single project like this, but as a community. This app was first conceived by Shawn McDougal at the 2012 Code for Oakland community hackathon and was brought to prototype stage on the day despite massive data issues. They even won the grand prize. Both I and Eddie Tejeda realized there needed to be a place and a community to sustain and to support great projects like this, hence our weekly free hack night in City Hall. The Hack the Budget team (round 1 name) enlisted great support from the city Budget Advisory Committee to help make the app usable and accurate and it seemed from the sidelines that a stable place to meet and work on civic projects was important for this group.
When the app was almost ready to launch and we had our project submission process finished we were thrilled to have this team apply to be a supported part of OpenOakland- so we now have another great tool in our stack of open government apps in Oakland! OpenBudgetOakland.org is now a tool were going to support as a Code for America Brigade- and we’re hoping you have ideas also about how this great tool can be even better! share them with us on the site after you’ve explored it…
Intelligence, technology and history.
“We may yet employ our vast technology to the task of obliterating ourselves and life on earth. This possibility should surprise no one: throughout history, humankind has exhibited an enthusiastic genius for establishing hells on earth that surpass the misery of those conceived by our poets, artists, and theologians. On the other hand, the ability to deliberate together may be our most powerful—yet neglected—natural resource. And in our embrace of open governance, we may discover that it is the key to civic intelligence.”
Douglas Schuler in Open Government.
California USPS Vacancy Rates: Map & Data
Did you think your postman/woman just delivered your mail? Wrong. They happen to be a rather awesome real-time crowd sourcing force for public data! When your mail is delivered and you turn out to not be there, and this keeps happening for a month, or for three months, your responsive public servants take note of this, it goes into a big database and gets spat out courtesy of HUD in a tract level file. It also happens to track business vacancies. Check it.
Some truthiness to know- no data are perfect. These suffer from many variations and local contexts that make them tricky at times, but they are an amazing resource, and these data get republished every quarter. I threw together the map above in a couple of hours, part of my playing/learning with MapBox, which I fricking love already. My biggest delay was generating these tiles for the web and realizing I had left a background layer turned on rendered blue which prevented the street layer from showing through. You learn that lesson once. Waiting 4 hours for a render job and getting unusable map layers is a bad experience.
Check the full screen version out here:
http://tiles.mapbox.com/urbanstrategies/map/map-yn73atfz
Nice map, but I want the data dammit! Fine, have it. Both shapefiles and clean csv files on our data portal: http://data.openoakland.org/en/dataset/vacancyratesusps
I do get that the multiple decimal places is annoying, but I’m not re-doing this again… the map hover/click functionality also gives you the business vacancy rates too, as the baseline data for how many units of residential and commercial are in each tract for context.
Democratizing Knowledge with Oakland Wiki
It’s a rare and wonderful thing to be so involved in a city like Oakland, to get to be part of so many awesome organizations, initiatives and projects and to have access to so much rich data and personal knowledge about our city. It’s also challenging to face the fact that so much of our institutional and community knowledge is locked away in the minds of our elders, our colleagues, our servers, and hence is not accessible for our community at large. Unless they schedule time to talk to said people. This creates a problem of knowledge scale and transfer, of concentrated soft power. I’m calling it soft because it doesn’t really make you a boss to know stats or history of a community, but it is still powerful to have access to so much info on your community, in the right setting.
For the past few years I’ve been more focused on publishing our work widely, not to make us look like experts, but to actually share what we do, what we learn, what we care about. It seems there’s another level needed here too- sharing what we know, and even deeper, sharing what we share with others in intimate settings. Every question asked of you- chances are someone else wants that answer too. And they won’t ever get to ask you. The data you issue someone in response to a request, the facts you smugly share about something you know that the asker didn’t. If we only share things once, in non-transferable formats we are not doing all we can to democratize knowledge, to make the best use of what we know.
In the past this has meant we publish our internal project maps and reports for others to use, then we publish raw data, then we make it usable for others. The next step may be to wiki our responses.
Yes, wiki.
An example from today. Someone mentions something on twitter about neighborhoods and their definitions in Oakland, about how they vary. In response, to help inform this conversation about a city I love and know something about I have a couple of options. I can make a benign tweet response, I can maybe email a link or share a photo, or I can pass along information in a more permanent way, in a way that can perhaps help others. This later option is becoming my default. Instead of a light, individual contact with an inquiry or a random interest, I can put down some of what I know, some of what I have (data, reports) and put it in context (hopefully) and make it available for everyone. It turns out that a local wiki like OaklandWiki.org is perfect for this!
It took me about 10 minutes to update a page on a particular neighborhood that was a perfect demonstration of the issue being discussed, (Lower) San Antonio. I can include some of what I know through research, through relationships, share data snippets and content relevant to the community. Fast, easy, permanent and open to anyone. Instead of just a small channel of communication, I can share a response, a story, a factoid with anyone who bothers to google it. In a sector obsessed with Social Impact, it seems one of the highest yield things we can do is to share what we know, what we have, especially when those things are not openly available to others in our community!
This applies to all of us- Oaklandwiki.org is not just a system for “experts”, it’s open for anyone who knows something about Oakland to contribute, to share. Just like libraries were the place we stored and made available “what we knew”, local wiki’s are increasingly becoming the place where we can all share and access “what we all know”.
Steve Spiker 