Hacks and hackers day: Using data to track Bobbies on the Beat

Got up ridiculously early on Friday 16th July to head up the motorways, with Joni Alexander in tow, to take part in the ScraperWiki Hacks and Hackers event in Liverpool.

Despite feeling as though we’d stumbled into the middle of a Liverpool Daily Post & Echo school outing, we soon found ourselves immersed in trying to use data to tell a story and do something useful with it.

Media organisations have access to, possess and make use of a lot of data. But how much they make use of it, is limited. The Guardian is certainly leading the way with the DataBlog, to give you the numbers behind the headlines but particularly in regional and local journalism there isn’t a lot of spewing out of data. That’s mainly because there just aren’t the resources or the time.

However, we enlisted the help of master programmer Julian Todd, the man behind The Straight Choice, to get us up and running. Our team (me, Julian, Joni and Jo Kelly) had a big interest in local information, so we trawled through the Liverpool Echo’s website in the districts section. Huyton. Toxteth. These are the places where our readers live and what do they care about? With talk of public sector cuts and ‘frontline services’ being protected we thought it would be interesting to show how scraping data could help expose any cuts to ‘frontline services’. So ‘Plod Watch’ was born – complete with a rather rubbish hand drawn logo.

We scraped the data from the Merseyside Police website about PCSOs and PCs. We were able to pull contact information for each officer and a photo of them as well. We then set about attaching the Merseyside Police areas to the Liverpool Echo’s areas. Very different as we discovered.

Eventually we came up with a page that showed all the officers who policed that Liverpool Echo district. Now the clever bit. Everytime Merseyside Police update their website and remove an officer, a big red X will appear across that officer’s face and an email will be sent to the journalist who covers the patch to find out why. Officer promoted? Officer left for better things? Or have the ConDem cuts come swinging their way into a frontline service?

We also scraped the Echo’s website itself to show the story count in a graph for the district. This could then be filtered down to show the story count for crime stories in the Echo website. We could also look at embedding the faces of police officers in the relevant district pages to as a ‘your local police’ widget allowing people to click through directly to their local officers. No more the faceless, car driving, bobby. They’d be on the virtual beat.

The day itself showed some amazing things could be done with data, and showed how when programmers/developers are paired with journalists they can do some great things. It reminded me though that despite all this great data, you still need journalistic minds to interrogate it and find the stories and pick out what’s important to people.

So, keep your eyes peeled as Plod Watch might be coming to a local newspaper website near you.

You can read some great write ups about the day from Alison Gow and Mike Nolan

How do you or would you use data? Have you seen any examples of regional/local websites publishing data? Let me know in the comments below

Image credit to guinavere

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