Advancing the Police Data Initiative

The issue of police transparency, especially regarding open data, remains a growing public policy topic. Partnering with the Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C. based non-profit dedicated to advancing policing through innovation and science, analysts at Socrata helped automate the ingress and centralization from various police data sources using FME Cloud. This represents an important step in White House Police Data Initiative with the intent of increasing access and availability of important police data. This presentation will touch upon the process of pulling data from disparate APIs, transforming data into more standardized formats, and finally the benefits of cloud-based automation and connectivity. Also discussed will be the data collected, how FME plays in integral role in achieving the goals of the Police Foundation, and a vision for future prospects of opening police data to the public in novel ways.