Seattle crime data reporting

[eridani]

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/million-stories-redacted-city-how-seattle-handles-open-crime-data

It seems like Seattle, which has been producing crime data in this way for about eight months of Data.Seattle.gov's one-year run so far, has figured out a way to address a problem that many cities share. So I asked Seattle Police Department Assistant Chief Dick Reed, in charge of the city's field support bureau, which covers operations, how they did it.

"There will always be that balancing the right of the public to know what the policing agency is doing versus the privacy of the people who are making the complaints and involved in the event," Reed told me.

To try to reach that balance, the city decided to release a set of information about each incident on data.seattle.gov as soon as 12 hours after it occurs. Users who create a profile on the seattle.gov website can also access heavily redacted readouts of police reports about each incident, when they're available.

"The reports that generate this information are still available for public disclosure as they always have been," Reed told me, "but we're erring on the side of protecting the privacy of victims and witnesses, and the potential harm of identifying, yes, the police car you saw down the block was investigating the rape of a 10-year-old."

It's a compromise on transparency that shows more willingness to default to open than some other police departments. In New York City, for example, the police department's extension to releasing information online is limited to statistical reports released by individual precincts, in PDF format.