openpolicedata 0.8.1

The OpenPoliceData (OPD) Python library is the most comprehensive centralized public access point for incident-level police data in the United States. OPD provides easy access to 425+ incident-level datasets for about 4865 police agencies. Types of data include traffic stops, use of force, officer-involved shootings, and complaints.

OpenPoliceData

The OpenPoliceData (OPD) Python library is the most comprehensive centralized public access point for incident-level police data in the United States. OPD provides easy access to 425+ incident-level datasets for about 4865 police agencies. Types of data include traffic stops, use of force, officer-involved shootings, and complaints.

Users request data by department name and type of data, and the data is returned as a pandas DataFrame. There is no need to manually find the data online or to know how to work with open data APIs (ArcGIS, Socrata, etc.). When data is loaded by OPD, the returned data is unmodified (with the exception of formatting known date fields) from what appears on the source's site, and OPD provides links to the original data for transparency.

OpenPoliceData can be installed from the Python Package Index (PyPI):

pip install openpolicedata

OpenPoliceData provides access to police data with 2 simple lines of code:

> import openpolicedata as opd
> src = opd.Source("New Orleans")
> data = src.load(table_type="USE OF FORCE", year=2022)

NEW STARTING IN VERSION 0.6: OPD now provides tools for automated data standardization. Applying these tools allow you to start your analysis more quickly by replacing column names and data with standard values for some common column types. Learn how it works and how to use it here.

• Documentation: https://openpolicedata.readthedocs.io/
• Source Code: https://github.com/openpolicedata/openpolicedata
• Bug Tracker: https://github.com/openpolicedata/openpolicedata/issues
• Latest Datasets
• Release Notes
• Contributing

Latest Datasets Added to OPD

• Washington D.C.: Historical (2010-2017) stops data
• South Bend, IN: Complaints involving administrative investigations
• Tucson, AZ: Added additional years of arrests
• Sacramento, CA: Calls for service and citations
• Cedar Lake, IN: Arrests, calls for service, and citations data
• Griffith, IN: Arrests, calls for service, and citations data
• Austin, TX: Arrests, incidents, searches, use of force, and warnings
• New York, NY: Latest pedestrian stops dataset
• Chicago, IL: Latest pedestrian stops dataset
• Washington D.C.: Latest use of force dataset

v0.8.1 - 2024-09-02

Fixed

• Fixed bug in get_count function for CSV files where count was wrong if there were quotes containing new line characters

v0.8 - 2024-08-24

Added

• Added data loader for HTML tables

Changed

• Changed error messages so that more errors in data loading point the user to the list of data site outages

Fixed

• Fixed bug in CKAN data loader when user requests a range of years

Complete change log available at: https://github.com/openpolicedata/openpolicedata/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Contributing

All contributions are welcome including code enhancments, bug fixes, bug reports, documentation updates, and locating new datasets. If you're interesting in helping out, see our Contributing Guide or reach out by email.