Data for the people

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Welcome!

This new blog is part of my work with Los Altos for Racial Equity (LARE) to advocate for racial equity in policing. I'm not gonna lie, it's gonna be pretty nerdy. If you are passionate about racial equity in Santa Clara County, but you don't like math, go check out LARE. There's lots of good policy work to do there and you won't have to say "standard deviation."

Over here though, I wanted to start working through some of the amazing complexity in analyzing police data. Like most data analysis, 90% of the work is in getting the data cleaned and organized. But that last 10% can be really tricky to get right. I'll be using this space to explore some analyses, and hopefully get a lot of feedback from you about how we can make the analysis better.

All of the code I use is intended to be available on github so that you can see what I'm doing and help me catch my mistakes.

My goals are twofold:

  • To get accurate, meaningful data analysis that can help the City Council, Police Department, and the other stakeholders in Los Altos to create better policy
  • To provide a roadmap and tools for other Bay Area communities to improve their own policing.
No one thinks it is acceptable to have the kind of racial bias that we've seen nationwide in our policing. Let's start here, in Los Altos, where the problems should be easiest to solve, and see if we can't do a really great job.

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