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Tired of Being Profiled, a Programmer Turns to Crowdsourcing Cop Reviews
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
It would be hard to find an American over the age of 25 who hasn’t had at least one face-to-face interaction with a police officer. Even those who haven’t are just one car accident, stolen bike or blown red light away from such a meeting.
Yet despite the fact that policing is arguably one of the most important and powerful service professions a civilized society can produce, it’s far easier to find out if the plumber you just hired broke someone’s pipe while fixing their toilet than it is to find out if the cop patrolling your neighborhood broke someone’s head while arresting them.
A 31-year-old computer programmer has set out to fix that glitch with a new web-based (and soon to be mobile) crowdsourced rating tool called CopScore that is designed to help communities distinguish police officers who are worthy of praise from those who are not fit to wear the uniform.
“My goal is to provide a level of transparency into what kind of people police departments are putting on the streets,” explains CopScore creator Arion Hardison, whose day job is platform director at Los Angeles-based NationBuilder — a developer of digital tools for community organizers. “Right now police insist on being viewed and respected as a class, so you don’t know how to tell the good cops from the bad ones. I wanted to find a way to show police as individuals.”
Hardison launched CopScore in January with $15,000 of his own money and is currently trying to raise $10,000 to continue development and engage community groups to help pilot it.
CopScore is a work in progress, and, for the time being at least, a one-man show. Hardison does all the coding himself, often working through the night to bring new features online.
Currently in the very early beta stage, the platform works by consolidating information on the service records of individual police officers together with details of their interactions with constituents. The searchable platform includes data gleaned from public sources — such as social media and news articles — cross-referenced with Yelp-style ratings from citizens.
For Hardison, CopScore is as much a personal endeavor as it is a professional one. He says his youthful interest in computer programming — which he took up as a misbehaving fifth-grader under the guiding hand of a concerned teacher — made him the butt of the occassional joke in the predominantly African-American community of North Nashville where he grew up.
But even his status as a high-dollar tech worker hasn’t protected him from the profiling and harassment faced by all men of color, regardless of age, title or the number of zeros in their paycheck.
“Young black men in America are raised knowing they are viewed differently by police, but it doesn’t really hit home until it’s reinforced,” says Hardison. For him that moment came in 2008, shortly after moving to California, when he called the Lynwood police dispatch to report the theft of two laptops and an iPhone that had been taken from his room.
“Instead of helping, I ended up cuffed in the back of a cop car being run for warrants while an officer searched my room,” Hardison recalls. He says the officer left after he finished checking him out without so much as filing a report about the stolen items.
That negative experience with police was the first of many he has had over the past six years, he says, working as a programmer in the tech hubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles — where a black man running late to work with a laptop in his hand can qualify as reasonable suspicion for a stop-and-frisk. (Hardison says it’s happened to him twice).
Hardison designed CopScore, in part, to give a voice to people who have similarly frustrating encounters with police, and to provide community organizers, journalists and researchers a potentially powerful tool for exposing police misconduct.
But he’s also sensitive to the pervasive negative attitude many communities have developed with regards to police, and he is quick to point out that CopScore is not just about calling out bad officers, but also celebrating good ones.
“I understand there is an inherent bias against officers so I’m really working to offset that,” he says. “My point is to actually facilitate change, and you can’t do that if you’re validating people’s existing ideas about police behavior.”
Journalists and data scientists are optimistic about the potential of a tool like CopScore, but with a few caveats.
George Fachner, a police research scientist, says CopScore has the unique potential to put first-hand citizen accounts of encounters with the police in the hands of researchers who specialize in analyzing police behavior. But he adds that crowdsourcing has its limits.
“In terms of measuring overall citizen satisfaction with any particular officer or department, I would be most concerned with the representativeness of the sample of entries on the site and, therefore, validity of those measurements,” Fachner says.
There’s also the issue of bias. Hardison has spent a lot of time thinking about that and is working tirelessly on a workaround. So far he has verified more than 7,000 of the original 25,654 officer profiles he used to populate the site by recruiting teams of community organizers in select cities to serve as auditors. This involves everything from confirming an officer’s badge number to checking news articles to verifying details of noteworthy events. Ratings from individual citizens or alleged victims of police violence are not independently checked, however, which opens the potential for subjective embellishment, at the very least.
Journalist Kenneth Lipp, co-editor of The Declaration, which exposes police malfeasance, echoes Fachner’s concern about the pitfalls of drawing inferences from small sample sizes. But in light of the deficit of available data on police encounters with citizens he seems less concerned about bias.
“For my personal purposes, every source, even one which I have to retroactively verify, is welcome,” he says. “As long as the climate of official opacity exists on my beat, gleaning sites like CopScore for news is a task I go about regularly and gratefully because that’s the only way I can do my job.”
Christopher Moraff writes on politics, civil liberties and criminal justice policy for a number of media outlets. He is a reporting fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a frequent contributor to Next City and Al Jazeera America.
Has the Shift to Mixed-Income Housing Created a Tale of Two Atlantas?
Students at Charles R. Drew charter school, adjacent to the Villages at East Lake in Atlanta (Credit: East Lake Foundation)
“It was like there was a moat of vacant, red clay around East Lake Meadows, where homes and businesses existed a generation ago,” recalls Carol Naughton.
Constructed in 1970, East Lake Meadows was a 650-unit public housing complex four miles east of downtown Atlanta. By the time Naughton first visited in 1995 — during her first months working as a commercial real estate lawyer for the Atlanta Housing Authority — she says it was “struggling in every measure.” The employment rate of residents was only 14 percent. The crime rate there was 18 times the national average. Only 5 percent of fifth-graders were meeting or exceeding the state math standards.
East Lake Meadows, before (Credit: East Lake Foundation)
East Lake Meadows, after (Credit: East Lake Foundation)
“There was really a dearth of services associated with the community and over time, families associated with East Lake Meadows were falling farther and farther down the food chain,” says Naughton.
That year, the City of Atlanta announced that it would be tearing down East Lake Meadows. Local civic and business leaders, including millionaire real estate developer/philanthropist Tom Cousins, helped to found the East Lake Foundation, which guided the public housing development’s demolition and the construction of The Villages at East Lake — the third mixed-income deal signed in the country.
The Villages at East Lake is photogenic and modern, and set among some of Atlanta’s most impressive amenities. Nearby you can find an attractive supermarket, a YMCA, two preschools, a renovated golf course, and an educational crown jewel: the celebrated Charles R. Drew charter school — Atlanta’s first — built in 2000. In 2013, 98 percent of third- through eighth-graders from East Lake met or exceeded state standards in math. The 2013 violent crime rate was 95 percent lower than 1995’s East Lake Meadows-era number.
The philosophy behind East Lake’s transformation — that you can create upward mobility through breaking up housing blocks of concentrated poverty and replacing them with mixed-income developments paired with services — is guiding affordable housing policies in cities around the country. The transformational work done by East Lake Foundation made the organization an early beacon for this idea, due to their stunning outcomes.
But not everyone who used to live in East Lake Meadows currently enjoys the amenities of the Villages at East Lake. According to Naughton, 400 families were spread throughout East Lake Meadows in 1995. Only 100 returned after construction was completed of the new village in 1998. (Those that did passed a screening test with work requirements; the process barred the formerly incarcerated.) At the time, former East Lake Meadows tenants, concerned about displacement, filed a lawsuit, which they subsequently lost. Today, 50 percent of the 542 units in the rebuilt Villages of East Lake are reserved for families on public assistance.
“There are mixed-income communities that do work, but not everyone gets invited back to experience the same level of services available at The Villages at East Lake,” says King Williams, director of The Atlanta Way, a forthcoming documentary about the dismantling of Atlanta’s public housing.
In 2009, Atlanta became the first major U.S. city to phase out all of its traditional, project-based public housing. Displaced residents were provided with housing vouchers they could take to mixed-income developments or elsewhere. In the documentary, Williams interviews former traditional public housing residents, compiles found footage from local TV news broadcasts, and places the relocation process within the context of Atlanta’s history of class- and race-based discrimination, namely the Atlanta Compromise Speech given by Booker T. Washington in 1895. The most famous speech by the leader laid out a de facto policy where southern blacks would relinquish their civil and political rights in a tradeoff for economic opportunities.
“It’s more or less [the idea that] if the white elites and the black elites can work together in business and commerce, things can be OK,” says Williams. “How this relates to our overall film and our overall telling of this particular story, is that this is the story of the haves — particularly those from the business community and those with a vested interest in Atlanta. [They] have now made decisions that essentially benefit them more so than the people themselves.”
Dierdre Oakley, a sociology professor at Georgia State University, has been trackingformer public housing residents relocated through voucher programs around the country. In Atlanta, she’s observed that displaced voucher-holders have tended to move to areas with slightly less crime and poverty in the Southeast and Southwest parts of the city. Nonetheless, these areas are similar to the old public housing projects in that there is still segregation by race, and social networks are still stratified income. (There’s other evidence that race has an enduring significance in housing for low-income people that has transferred over to mixed-income housing.)
“If you look at it within what the goals of what poverty deconcentration were for these public housing transformation efforts, those goals really aren’t being met,” says Oakley. “If you look at the goals for self-sufficiency, these residents are still poor. There’s very little upward mobility going on.
“If you think about how many people were relocated because of [the demolition of Atlanta’s traditional public housing], a very small percentage are benefiting from redevelopment,” she adds. “When they give you all of these statistics about East Lake and how wonderful it’s doing, etc., I don’t think it’s not real, but I think it has to be looked at within the context of the broader outcomes and consequences of demolition.”
Naughton points out that the goal of the East Lake Foundation was a place-based intervention and that residents were given agency in the process, saying, “Sometimes people don’t qualify to come back, but lots of people don’t want to come back. I always want to create opportunities for people to have choice — and then try to earn them back.” The burden of how relocation was executed fell to the local housing authority.
East Lake’s success was so striking that the East Lake Foundation spun off an entirely new nonprofit consulting group, Purpose Built Communities, to work at replicating the Atlanta outcomes in other communities of concentrated poverty around the country. The 10 mixed-income communities they’ve advised so far include Columbia Parc at the Bayou District in New Orleans (which replaced the St. Bernard Housing project razed after Hurricane Katrina), Renaissance West in Charlotte, and Avondale Meadows in Indianapolis.
Shirley Franklin, mayor of Atlanta from 2002 to 2008, is Purpose Built Communities’ CEO. (Naughton is senior vice president.)
“When I was mayor, I [was] supportive in small ways of the work that was going on in East Lake,” says Franklin. “After leaving office at the end of 2009, it became clear to me that this was the kind of work that I wanted to spend my time on before I retire. Why is that? Because the issues of intractable, persistent and generational poverty have plagued cities for decades and decades. I believe this is a model that is replicable and really opens the door of opportunity.”
For each community that Purpose Built Communities works in, they require the establishment of a lead organization to become a “community quarterback” that drives the creation of mixed-income housing, a cradle-to-college educational pipeline and the improvement of community wellness.
“People in city governments have been excited about our model, because it gives them an exit strategy,” says Naughton. “They can help tee up an opportunity, help create some of the funding models and know it’s going to be well-executed, so they can take their time and move on to the next neighborhood that needs that focus and intervention.”
When Williams considers the larger shift from traditional public housing to mixed-income housing, he sees those who fall between the cracks and a “tale of two Atlantas.”
“The closing of the public housing projects in Atlanta signified the end of one particular era,” says Williams, “the era that we think of Atlanta as the Black Mecca, the [home of] black leadership and black political power.”
Franklin sees the current political climate as perfect for targeted, “spot clean” approaches like Purpose Built Communities’ because equity has become a national preoccupation.
“I’m a child of the ‘60s,” says Franklin. “The issues of poverty, discrimination and inequality were topics of the day when I was in high school and college. It’s almost like bell-bottomed pants. It’s come back as a topic of discussion. But clearly the United States’ many public leaders are looking for these kinds of answers.”
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Alexis Stephens is Next City’s urban economics fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
Chicago Denies the Koch Brothers
A huge mound of petroleum coke sits in a Chicago residential area. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Chicago voters may be skeptical of their Mayor’s commitment to neighborhoods, but Rahm Emanuel did get tough this week when it came to putting people before petcoke.
The Chicago Department of Public Health denied a request to extend the deadline for covering the piles of petroleum coke (aka petcoke) stored at terminals on Chicago’s Far South Side. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman John Pope of the 10th Ward announced the decision not to grant a request from Koch Industries subsidiary KCBX Terminals Company for an additional 14 months to comply with city regulations that require facilities to enclose their petcoke piles. According to a statement from the Mayor’s office:
CDPH did not grant this request due to the inadequacy of the KCBX request, which lacked important information on fire prevention measures, storm water management and building code compliance.
“From the beginning my message to the petcoke operators has been simple: clean up or shut down,” said Emanuel. “KCBX needs to demonstrate that it will take serious steps to reduce the impact of its operations on the residents of the Southwest side or it has no place in any part of Chicago.”
As Curbed Chicago details, “a toxic by-product of oil refining, the substance has been observed coating the sides of homes in the nearby 10th Ward, as the massive piles that line the Calumet River at 10730 South Burley Avenue in South Deering sit near residential areas.”
This is one of many efforts by Emanuel and Pope to protect residents from petcoke dust. Most recently, this January, the City Council approved an ordinance directing the planning department to establish a ceiling on the amount of petcoke that can enter the city by the end of March.
Jenn Stanley is a freelance journalist, essayist and independent producer living in Chicago. She has an M.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Winter-Weary Boston Struggles to Shelter the Homeless
Boston’s tough winter has left a growing homeless population very vulnerable. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
Boston officials estimate that the city’s homeless population is up 30 percent from last year. With the closing of the city’s largest shelter, and efforts to ban people from sleeping in train stations and at the airport, advocates for the homeless say they’re struggling to get people indoors at a time when winter has been pounding the city relentlessly.
So advocates have stepped up and reopened the Boston Night Center, a last resort for people living on the streets who can’t or won’t go to a shelter. The Center is a small room where sometimes more than 80 people sleep on mats on the floor. Unlike a shelter, people can come and go throughout the night.
WBUR reports that “Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program is paying about $65,000 a month to Bay Cove Human Services to operate this center until the spring.” Jim O’Connell, program president, told WBUR that the center, which closed four years ago due to budget cuts, can be chaotic.
“It’s designed to be very low threshold, as you can tell,” he said. “There is a lot of tolerance — lots of people are psychotic, lots of people are unedited. Managing the milieu is a real art. These are the folks who literally have nowhere else to go except the street.”
Jenn Stanley is a freelance journalist, essayist and independent producer living in Chicago. She has an M.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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