OpenPDI

OpenPDI is an unofficial, open-source effort to document and standardize police-related data from the U.S.

What we do

In May 2015, the White House launched the Police Data Initiative (PDI) to encourage law enforcement agencies to release data on their interactions with the communities they serve. More than 130 agencies have released data on officer-involved shootings, use-of-force incidents, and traffic stops — but analyzing and visualizing it still poses a few challenges.

The Police Data Initiative promotes the use of open data to encourage joint problem solving, innovation, enhanced understanding, and accountability between communities and the law enforcement agencies that serve them.

Data storage

The PDI provides an index of available data but doesn't collect or maintain the data itself, so long-term availability often depends on an agency keeping links to data on its own servers. OpenPDI addresses this by collecting and storing the data via the publicly accessible Socrata Open Data Publisher API.

Data standardization

Because the PDI only links to external sources, there are no formatting requirements — file types, column names, and value formats vary widely, which makes analysis across states, agencies, and years difficult. OpenPDI provides access to standardized PDI data via an MIT-licensed, open-source Python library.

Data exploration

A 5,000-line CSV isn't much use to most people. OpenPDI lowers the barrier by presenting the standardized data on the web, so non-technical users can explore it directly — starting with officer-involved shootings and use of force.

Who maintains it

OpenPDI is maintained by Joseph Kato, a software developer who works on open-source language tooling — including the Go NLP library prose and the prose linter Vale.