How We’re Building on the President’s Call to Leverage Open Data to Increase Trust between Police and Citizens

In the fall of 2014, we began our time in the Administration as Presidential Innovation Fellows. Our service took place against the backdrop of a national conversation on police reform and how to increase trust between police departments and the communities they were sworn to protect and serve.

Emerging from that conversation, The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted the opportunity for technology and data to play a central role in building trust between law enforcement and communities while enhancing public safety.

As civic technologists, we had an idea to build on that opportunity:

What if we could help enable a new culture of open data in law enforcement agencies where police collaborate with their tech counterparts in local government and the community to publicly release incident-level, structured, machine-readable data on policing?

Today, the White House is welcoming 39 law enforcement agencies from across the country who are leading the way toward developing a culture of open data in policing through the President’s Police Data Initiative. Joining these agencies are community stakeholders, civic technologists and data scientists, researchers, and local officials.

Read the rest of this article by Clarence Wardell and Denice Ross on the White House Medium channel…