Talk

Chicago, IL June 10, 2017
How Can Open Data Help Facilitate Police Reform

Through social media, an awareness of officer-involved shootings has increased. Groups like #BlackLivesMatter find these incidents and publicize it through social media to highlight this problem. However, we do not know the extent of this problem because of the lack of accurate and comprehensive data. Given technological advances with analyzing "big data," there is no reason this cannot be applied to law enforcement. Having this information, we can understand the factors that cause adverse police behavior and develop efficient solutions that can improve policing. My talk will go through current efforts towards the creation of a comprehensive dataset and some preliminary results about the causes of police brutality.