Data Resources

 These are some good sites that provide various kinds of police data you can download.

City Protect

City Protect collects data from cooperating police departments across the United States. Clicking on a particular department shows locations of police activity on a map. Many departments only allow the public to see the map locations -- not of much practical value, except to incite fear of crime. However, some departments admirably allow you to download the data in CSV form. For those departments, you'll see a link "Download crime data" on the left.

This is not RIPA data, but rather incidents -- pretty much anything that the police respond to. It does not have any racial data included, but it does have times and locations.

Police Data Initiative 

The PDI is a directory to datasets provided by police departments around the country. Although it "designed to serve as a virtual resource for law enforcement agencies" there is a reasonable amount of data open to everyone. However, they only link to data hosted elsewhere; sometimes you'll find that data portal it links to has restricted access.

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