Policing Data: Webpages and Release
Background
The City of Takoma Park has prepared webpages allowing the public to understand and explore data on police interactions with the public, and made the raw datasets available.
The interactive webpages visualize data on traffic-stops between 2015 and 2020 and computer-assisted dispatch calls between 2018 and 2020; and data on arrests between 2015 and 2020. The release is consistent with one of the recommendations made by the Takoma Park Reimagining Public Safety Task Force to increase transparency and awareness surrounding public safety data and the department’s goal to be fully transparent with our community.
The city has also prepared two dashboards allowing the public to build their own visualizations of policing data, also linked below. For transparency and reproducibility, the city has posted the code used to produce these webpages to the city’s Github page.
Stops, arrests, and computer-aided dispatch datasets visualized in the webpages can be accessed here.
The data download also includes calls for service data from 2018 to 2020. A data-dictionary for the Police Department’s internal datasets can be found here, and a summary of statutes for traffic violations can be found here (data dictionaries for public datasets are included in the data-download zip file). Word versions of the webpages can be accessed here.