Open Data Initiative on Criminal Justice

The policing research group has started making Freedom of Information Act requests to over 40 police departments across the United States and has received data from more than 10 of them. 

The group will continue to engage in data extraction and systematization from diverse data sources related to law enforcement, including texts from social media, images from police body cameras, mobility data from cell phones, etc. 

The group is working on using Azure Synapse Analytics to host all the relevant data and offer Python/R/Stata interfaces to users from different programming backgrounds to query the data. 

This open data initiative will benefit researchers studying law enforcement and encourage exciting future research independent of this project.