Open data increases transparency, builds community trust, and supports innovation
The Police Foundation is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit dedicated to advancing policing through innovation and science.
With a dedicated Task Force on 21st Century Policing, they wanted to share data using a combined open data portal. This external data about police-citizen interactions would be shared with the community and used to identify and disseminate best practices. Internally, this data would be used to improve early warning systems, uphold internal accountability, and decrease inappropriate uses of force.
How they made it possible – no code required
The data would be shared as part of a combined open data portal, built by analysts at Socrata – a cloud software company focusing on open data and other solutions for digital government to improve society.
Socrata used the FME Platform to design workflows that pull data from disparate APIs and transformed the data into more standardized formats.
This project represents an important step in the White House Police Data Initiative to increase access and availability of police data, which remains a growing public policy topic.
