How Cincinnati’s open data sparks collaboration between police and community groups
The city government and the community of Cincinnati have been pioneers of open data. Over 15-years ago, an agreement was formed to make policing and crime data publicly accessible.
In 2002, the City of Cincinnati, the Black United Front, the ACLU, and the Fraternal Order of Police entered into a collaborative agreement. It provided a foundation for the city government and the community to improve police-community relationships with data. The agreement has noble principles, “…that different groups within the community with different experiences and perspectives share much more in common than not, and can work together on common goals and solve problems together.” For more information about the Collaborative Agreement.
Fast-forward to 2016, Cincinnati is now publishing open data from multiple departments, and has a data portal where it can be retrieved.
The City of Cincinnati and the Cincinnati Police Department utilize this state-of-the-art method to make crime data freely accessible to the public. The White House Police Data Initiative and our efforts in Cincinnati, represent new innovative ways for people from the community to make a real difference. Citizens can use this data to take a more active role in their government by using open data to create a dialogue.
Applications help create a story with data
Foxtrot Code’s event on August 13th brought together a diverse group of people wanting to use open data to tell their story and begin to describe the causes of crime as well as what needs to change. The discussion led to different kinds of app ideas, implementations, and overall how this group could use the available open data on Foxtrot Code. The primary focus was centered on our national data project and contest called “Understanding Crime in America.” Many were interested in the accessibility of open data from over 17 cities, as well as data from Twitter, the Weather Company, and other sources.
Some of the applications discussed included: analyzing crime incident reports and calls for service to find early warnings of people needing help from various community and social services; the relationship of permits and improvements to changing neighborhoods, the pressure on low income housing needs in the community; as well as an analysis of the concentration of crime in certain neighborhoods.
Our non-traditional hackathon was a group discussion about application development and design using open data to understand crime. We shared with the group that cities like Cincinnati face a difficult task of determining what data to share with the public. The event taught everyone how Apps can be used to inform the city and the police department where additional data is needed.
Overall, many were completely shocked by how quickly they could get started and perform an analysis with open data.
Accessible platforms for application development are hard to find
Open data creates an inescapable equilibrium bringing together community organizers, corporate developers, city government employees, members of law enforcement agencies, and citizens with an interest in a common dialogue. However, open access to data is just the beginning of the process. Most people don’t have the tools or the expertise to actually get started using the data.
Civic-interest storytelling where a diverse group from the community is speaking with data is fairly uncommon. The barrier to entry is the complicated data platforms that require significant system engineering and programming expertise.
Our app platform is designed to fundamentally change the traditional process of getting started with data. Every app built on Foxtrot Code can be reused as a starting point for beginning another data project. This helps people who are not experts in big data or programming to quickly develop complex apps by reusing existing apps from our marketplace. For example, people from Cincinnati can reuse an app built by an expert in Austin to create a more powerful collaborative analysis.
Foxtrot Code simplifies the complexity of sophisticated data analytic products with a user interface specially designed for building applications that run on a large-scale, cloud-based, big data environment. Our platform’s core is built from technologies like React and Node that leverage Splunk, the big data framework. Splunk supports large-scale, complex analyses with big and small data sources.
Splunk itself isn’t new to open data — in fact, through their Splunk4Good program, Splunk works to help governments and nonprofits at all levels showcase the power of open data. With more than 11,000 customers around the world — including many in federal, state, and local government — they have simplified the process of accessing open data with modular inputs, and even built pro bono projects with partners from FEMA, the EPA, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Diverse context yields a better analysis
The Foxtrot Code hackathon was different from most other civic hackathons. The participants from the community have experience and context with the issues, which yielded a powerful discussion. We talked about building applications with open data that expose the systematic problems that the African-American and Homeless community experience beyond crime and policing.
The positive response from the participants is encouraging for open data application development. One of the participants remarked, “I wasn’t aware this data was even available,” and another said, “this will be a powerful way to demonstrate to the police and the city how we see the problems in our neighborhoods, and what data will help us describe the underlying issues.”
Applications developed by the community can help start an unambiguous dialogue with their local governments and police departments. Open data is a valuable next step for the community’s and government’s efforts in data-driven dialogue.
