Data-Driven Justice Initiative, Disrupting Cycle of Incarceration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Every year, more than 11 million people move through America’s 3,100 local jails, many on low-level, non-violent misdemeanors, costing local governments approximately $22 billion a year. In local jails, 64 percent of people suffer from mental illness, 68 percent have a substance abuse disorder, and 44 percent suffer from chronic health problems. Communities across the country have recognized that a relatively small number of these highly vulnerable people cycle repeatedly not just through local jails, but also hospital emergency rooms, shelters, and other public systems, receiving fragmented and uncoordinated care at great cost to American taxpayers, with poor outcomes.

For example, in Miami-Dade, Florida found that 97 people with serious mental illness accounted for $13.7 million in services over four years, spending more than 39,000 days in either jail, emergency rooms, state hospitals or psychiatric facilities in their county. In response, the county provided key mental health de-escalation training to their police officers and 911 dispatchers and, over the past five years, Miami-Dade police have responded to nearly 50,000 calls for service for people in mental health crisis, but have made only 109 arrests, diverting more than 10,000 people to services or safely stabilizing situations without arrest. The jail population fell from over 7000 to just over 4700 and the county was able to close an entire jail facility, saving nearly $12 million a year.

In addition, on any given day, more than 450,000 people are held in jail before trial, nearly 63 percent of the local jail population, even though they have not been convicted of a crime. A 2014 study of New York’s Riker’s Island jail found more than 86% percent of detained individuals were held on a bond of $500 or less. To tackle the challenges of bail, in 2014 Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC began using a data-based risk assessment tool to identify low risk people in jail and find ways to release them safely. Since they began using the tool, the jail population has gone down 20 percent, significantly more low-risk individuals have been released from jail, and there has been no increase in reported crime.

To break this cycle of incarceration, the Administration has launched the Data-Driven Justice Initiative with a bipartisan coalition of city, county, and state governments who have committed to using data-driven strategies to divert low-level offenders with mental illness out of the criminal system and to change approaches to pre-trial incarceration so that low risk offenders no longer stay in jail simply because they cannot afford a bond. These innovative strategies, which have measurably reduced jail populations in several communities, help stabilize individuals and families, better serve communities, and, often, saves money in the process. DDJ communities commit to:

  1. combining data from across criminal justice and health systems to identify the individuals with the highest number of contacts with police, ambulance, emergency departments, and other services, and, leverage existing resources to link them to health, behavioral health, and social services in the community;
  2. equipping law enforcement and first responders to enable more rapid deployment of tools, approaches, and other innovations they need to safely and more effectively respond to people in mental health crisis and divert people with high needs to identified service providers instead of arrest; and
  3. working towards using objective, data-driven, validated risk assessment tools to inform the safe release of low-risk defendants from jails in order to reduce the jail population held pretrial….(More: FactSheet)”

Open data for transit app developers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Creating good transit apps can be difficult, given the vast amount of city (and worldwide) data app builders need to have access to. Aiming to address this, Transitland is an open platform that aggregates publicly available transport information from around the world.

The startup cleans the data sets, making them easy-to-use, and adds them to Mapzen, an open source mapping platform. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn is the platform’s transport planning service that, following its latest expansion, now contains data from more than 200 regions around the world on every continent except Antarctica. Transitland encourages anyone interested in transport, data and mapping to get involved, from adding data streams to sharing new apps and analyses. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn also manages all licensing related to use of the data, leaving developers free to discover and build. The platform is available to use for free.

We have seen a platform enable data sharing to help local communities and governments work better together, as well as a startup that visualizes government data so that it is easy-to-use for entrepreneurs….(More)”

How A Videogame Can Be A Source For Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jiwon Kim at PSFK: “The nonprofit Games For Change has a mission to utilize games to change the world. More specifically, it’s to facilitate “the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.”….PSFK decided to explore the three finalists up to win the award for the most innovative game of 2016:

1. Life is Strange: This game is comprised of five episodes that allow the gamer to turn back the time and change a chain of events. The gamers follow the protagonist, Maxine, as she uses her power to rewind time to save her friends and her town. This game is innovative in the sense that gamers intimately interact with this intricate plot while exploring important issues such as suicide, substance issues and relationships. The game is like a beautiful animated movie with great music, except the gamer decides the ending.

2. That Dragon, Cancer: The game’s creator, Ryan Green, is a programmer who wanted to share his experience of raising a young son struggling with cancer. The narrative video game retells how Ryan’s son and the rest of his family went on an emotional roller coaster ride that lasted years. Unfortunately, his son passed away but the Green family hopes that this game provides a deep insight into this difficult journey and dealing with feelings of hope and loss. The game brings in a new perspective and a new medium for intimate stories to be shared.

3. Lumino City: This game is entirely handcrafted with paper, miniature lights and motors. Lumino City is a beautiful 10-foot high city that serves as the setting of an exciting adventure. Gamers get to be Lumi, the protagonist, as she goes off on a journey to find her grandfather. Everything about this game is innovative in the sense that the creators fuse the digital world and traditional arts and crafts together….(More).

Directory of crowdsourcing websites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Directory by Donelle McKinley: “…Here is just a selection of websites for crowdsourcing cultural heritage. Websites are actively crowdsourcing unless indicated with an asterisk…The directory is organized by the type of crowdsourcing process involved, using the typology for crowdsourcing in the humanities developed by Dunn & Hedges (2012). In their study they explain that, “a process is a sequence of tasks, through which an output is produced by operating on an asset”. For example, the Your Paintings Tagger website is for the process of tagging, which is an editorial task. The assets being tagged are images, and the output of the project is metadata, which makes the images easier to discover, retrieve and curate.

Transcription

Alexander Research Library, Wanganui Library * (NZ) Transcription of index cards from 1840 to 2002.

Ancient Lives*, University of Oxford (UK) Transcription of papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt.

AnnoTate, Tate Britain (UK) Transcription of artists’ diaries, letters and sketchbooks.

Decoding the Civil War, The Huntington Library, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum &  North Carolina State University (USA). Transcription and decoding of Civil War telegrams from the Thomas T. Eckert Papers.

DIY History, University of Iowa Libraries (USA) Transcription of historical documents.

Emigrant City, New York Public Library (USA) Transcription of handwritten mortgage and bond ledgers from the Emigrant Savings Bank records.

Field Notes of Laurence M. Klauber, San Diego Natural History Museum (USA) Transcription of field notes by the celebrated herpetologist.

Notes from Nature Transcription of natural history museum records.

Measuring the ANZACs, Archives New Zealand and Auckland War Memorial Museum (NZ). Transcription of first-hand accounts of NZ soldiers in WW1.

Old Weather (UK) Transcription of Royal Navy ships logs from the early twentieth century.

Scattered Seeds, Heritage Collections, Dunedin Public Libraries (NZ) Transcription of index cards for Dunedin newspapers 1851-1993

Shakespeare’s World, Folger Shakespeare Library (USA) & Oxford University Press (UK). Transcription of handwritten documents by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Identification of words that have yet to be recorded in the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary.

Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Transcription Center (USA) Transcription of multiple collections.

Transcribe Bentham, University College London (UK) Transcription of historical manuscripts by philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham,

What’s on the menu? New York Public Library (USA) Transcription of historical restaurant menus. …

(Full Directory).

The Billions We’re Wasting in Our Jails

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Goldsmith  and Jane Wiseman in Governing: “By using data analytics to make decisions about pretrial detention, local governments could find substantial savings while making their communities safer….

Few areas of local government spending present better opportunities for dramatic savings than those that surround pretrial detention. Cities and counties are wasting more than $3 billion a year, and often inducing crime and job loss, by holding the wrong people while they await trial. The problem: Only 10 percent of jurisdictions use risk data analytics when deciding which defendants should be detained.

As a result, dangerous people are out in our communities, while many who could be safely in the community are behind bars. Vast numbers of people accused of petty offenses spend their pretrial detention time jailed alongside hardened convicts, learning from them how to be better criminals….

In this era of big data, analytics not only can predict and prevent crime but also can discern who should be diverted from jail to treatment for underlying mental health or substance abuse issues. Avoided costs aggregating in the billions could be better spent on detaining high-risk individuals, more mental health and substance abuse treatment, more police officers and other public safety services.

Jurisdictions that do use data to make pretrial decisions have achieved not only lower costs but also greater fairness and lower crime rates. Washington, D.C., releases 85 percent of defendants awaiting trial. Compared to the national average, those released in D.C. are two and a half times more likely to remain arrest-free and one and a half times as likely to show up for court.

Louisville, Ky., implemented risk-based decision-making using a tool developed by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and now releases 70 percent of defendants before trial. Those released have turned out to be twice as likely to return to court and to stay arrest-free as those in other jurisdictions. Mesa County, Colo., and Allegheny County, Pa., both have achieved significant savings from reduced jail populations due to data-driven release of low-risk defendants.

Data-driven approaches are beginning to produce benefits not only in the area of pretrial detention but throughout the criminal justice process. Dashboards now in use in a handful of jurisdictions allow not only administrators but also the public to see court waiting times by offender type and to identify and address processing bottlenecks….(More)”

In Your Neighborhood, Who Draws the Map?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lizzie MacWillie at NextCity: “…By crowdsourcing neighborhood boundaries, residents can put themselves on the map in critical ways.

Why does this matter? Neighborhoods are the smallest organizing element in any city. A strong city is made up of strong neighborhoods, where the residents can effectively advocate for their needs. A neighborhood boundary marks off a particular geography and calls out important elements within that geography: architecture, street fabric, public spaces and natural resources, to name a few. Putting that line on a page lets residents begin to identify needs and set priorities. Without boundaries, there’s no way to know where to start.

Knowing a neighborhood’s boundaries and unique features allows a group to list its assets. What buildings have historic significance? What shops and restaurants exist? It also helps highlight gaps: What’s missing? What does the neighborhood need more of? What is there already too much of? Armed with this detailed inventory, residents can approach a developer, city council member or advocacy group with hard numbers on what they know their neighborhood needs.

With a precisely defined geography, residents living in a food desert can point to developable vacant land that’s ideal for a grocery store. They can also cite how many potential grocery shoppers live within the neighborhood.

In addition to being able to organize within the neighborhood, staking a claim to a neighborhood, putting it on a map and naming it, can help a neighborhood control its own narrative and tell its story — so someone else doesn’t.

Our neighborhood map project was started in part as a response to consistent misidentification of Dallas neighborhoods by local media, which appears to be particularly common in stories about majority-minority neighborhoods. This kind of oversight can contribute to a false narrative about a place, especially when the news is about crime or violence, and takes away from residents’ ability to tell their story and shape their neighborhood’s future. Even worse is when neighborhoods are completely left off of the map, as if they have no story at all to tell.

Neighborhood mapping can also counter narrative hijacking like I’ve seen in my hometown of Brooklyn, where realtor-driven neighborhood rebranding has led to areas being renamed. These places have their own unique identities and histories, yet longtime residents saw names changed so that real estate sellers could capitalize on increasing property values in adjacent trendy neighborhoods.

Cities across the country — including Dallas, Boston, New York, Chicago,Portland and Seattle — have crowdsourced mapping projects people can contribute to. For cities lacking such an effort, tools like Google Map Maker have been effective….(More)”.

The Ideal Digital City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Digital Communities Special Report: “With urban areas continuing to grow at a substantial rate — from 30 percent of the world’s population in 1930 to a projected 66 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations — getting the urban experience right has become paramount. To help understand the building blocks to a successful digital city, The Digital Communities Special Report looks at five key technologies — broadband, open data, GIS, CRM and analytics — and provides a window into how they are helping city governments cope with economic, educational and societal demands.

The good news is that these essential technologies are getting cheaper, faster and better all the time. But technologies like these still cost money, need talent to run them and are dependent on the right policies if they are going to succeed. In other words, digital cities need smart thinking in order to work. Part one of this series examines the importance of broadband as a critical infrastructure and the challenges cities face in reaching universal adoption.

Part 1 | Broadband: 21st Century Infrastructure

Part 2 | Open Data & APIs: Collecting and Consuming What Cities Produce

Part 3 | GIS: An Established Technology Finds New Purpose

Part 4 | Customer Relationship Management: Diversity in Service

Part 5 | Analytics: Making Sense of City Data…(More)”

Civic Data Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Burak Arikan at Medium: “Big data is the term used to define the perpetual and massive data gathered by corporations and governments on consumers and citizens. When the subject of data is not necessarily individuals but governments and companies themselves, we can call it civic data, and when systematically generated in large amounts, civic big data. Increasingly, a new generation of initiatives are generating and organizing structured data on particular societal issues from human rights violations, to auditing government budgets, from labor crimes to climate justice.

These civic data initiatives diverge from the traditional civil society organizations in their outcomes,that they don’t just publish their research as reports, but also open it to the public as a database.Civic data initiatives are quite different in their data work than international non-governmental organizations such as UN, OECD, World Bank and other similar bodies. Such organizations track social, economical, political conditions of countries and concentrate upon producing general statistical data, whereas civic data initiatives aim to produce actionable data on issues that impact individuals directly. The change in the GDP value of a country is useless for people struggling for free transportation in their city. Incarceration rate of a country does not help the struggle of the imprisoned journalists. Corruption indicators may serve as a parameter in a country’s credit score, but does not help to resolve monopolization created with public procurement. Carbon emission statistics do not prevent the energy deals between corrupt governments that destroy the nature in their region.

Partnership / financing network of oil refinery and thermal power plants around SOCAR (The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan). Data mapping by Network of Dispossession.

Needless to say, civic data initiatives also differ from governmental institutions, which are reluctant to share any more that they are legally obligated to. Many governments in the world simply dump scanned hardcopies of documents on official websites instead of releasing machine-readable data, which prevents systematic auditing of government activities.Civic data initiatives, on the other hand, make it a priority to structure and release their data in formats that are both accessible and queryable.

Civic data initiatives also deviate from general purpose information commons such as Wikipedia. Because they consistently engage with problems, closely watch a particular societal issue, make frequent updates,even record from the field to generate and organize highly granular data about the matter….

Several civic data initiatives generate data on variety of issues at different geographies, scopes, and scales. The non-exhaustive list below have information on founders, data sources, and financial support. It is sorted according to each initiative’s founding year. Please send your suggestions to contact at graphcommons.com. See more detailed information and updates on the spreadsheet of civic data initiatives.

Open Secrets tracks data about the money flow in the US government, so it becomes more accessible for journalists, researchers, and advocates.Founded as a non-profit in 1983 by Center for Responsive Politics, gets support from variety of institutions.

PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. Uses on-the-record interviews as its data source. Founded in 2007 as a non-profit organization by Tampa Bay Times. Supported by Democracy Fund, Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, FordFoundation, Knight Foundation, Craigslist Charitable Fund, and the CollinsCenter for Public Policy…..

La Fabrique de La loi (The Law Factory) maps issues of local-regional socio-economic development, public investments, and ecology in France.Started in 2014, the project builds a database by tracking bills from government sources, provides a search engine as well as an API. The partners of the project are CEE Sciences Po, médialab Sciences Po, RegardsCitoyens, and Density Design.

Mapping Media Freedom identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout European Union member states,candidates for entry and neighbouring countries. Initiated by Index onCensorship and European Commission in 2004, the project…(More)”

What if Cities Used Data to Drive Inclusive Neighborhood Change?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Solomon Greene and Kathryn L.S. Pettit at the Urban Institute: “Policy responses to neighborhood changes that displace or otherwise harm vulnerable populations often come too late and at too great a price. This essay proposes integrating multiple data sources to develop neighborhood-level early warning and response systems that can help city leaders and community advocates get ahead of these changes. Using intelligence generated through these data systems, local leaders could adopt interventions that secure inclusion in dynamic neighborhoods.

This essay is part of a five-part series that explores how city leaders can promote local economies that are inclusive of all their residents. The framing brief, “Open Cities: From Economic Exclusion to Urban Inclusion,” defines economic exclusion and discusses city-level trends across high-income countries (Greene et al. 2016). The four “What if?” essays suggest bold and innovative solutions, and they are intended to spark debate on how cities might harness new technologies, rising momentum, and new approaches to governance in order to overcome economic exclusion….(More)”

City of Copenhagen launches data marketplace

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Wray at TMForum: “The City of Copenhagen has launched its City Data Exchange to make public and private data accessible to power innovation.

The City Data Exchange is a new service to create a ‘marketplace for data’ from public and private data providers and allow monetization. The platform has been developed by Hitachi Insight Group.

“Data is the fuel powering our digital world, but in most cities it is unused,” said Hans Lindeman, Senior Vice President, Hitachi Insight Group, EMEA. “Even where data sits in public, freely accessible databases, the cost of extracting and processing it can easily outweigh the benefits.”

The City of Copenhagen is using guidelines for a data format that is safe, secure, ensures privacy and makes data easy to use. The City Data Exchange will only accept data that has been fully anonymized by the data supplier, for example.

According to Hitachi Insight Group, “All of this spares organizations the trouble and cost of extracting and processing data from multiple sources. At the same time, proprietary data can now become a business resource that can be monetized outside an organization.”

As a way to demonstrate how data from the City Data Exchange could be used in applications, Hitachi Insight Group is developing two applications:

  • Journey Insight, which helps citizens in the region to track their transportation usage over time and understand the carbon footprint of their travel
  • Energy Insight, which allows both households and businesses to see how much energy they use.

Both are set for public launch later this year.

Another example of how data marketplaces can enable innovation is the Mind My Business mobile app, developed by Vizalytics. It brings together all the data that can affect a retailer — from real-time information on how construction or traffic issues can hurt the footfall of a business, to timely reminders about taxes to pay or new regulations to meet. The “survival app for shopkeepers” makes full use of all the relevant data sources brought together by the City Data Exchange.

The platform will offer data in different categories such as: city life, infrastructure, climate and environment, business data and economy, demographics, housing and buildings, and utilities usage. It aims to meet the needs of local government, city planners, architects, retailers, telecoms networks, utilities, and all other companies and organizations who want to understand what makes Copenhagen, its businesses and its citizens tick.

“Smart cities need smart insights, and that’s only possible if everybody has all the facts at their disposal. The City Data Exchange makes that possible; it’s the solution that will help us all to create better public spaces and — for companies in Copenhagen — to offer better services and create jobs,” said Frank Jensen, the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen.

The City Data Exchange is currently offering raw data to its customers, and later this year will add analytical tools. The cost of gathering and processing the data will be recovered through subscription and service fees, which are expected to be much lower than the cost any company or city would face in performing the work of extracting, collecting and integrating the data by themselves….(More)”