ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.
ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”
Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.
Someone make a mirror that just compiles anything ever posted to the db?
Fuck em. I mean we can use waynackmachine or whatever else for now, but that’s a dirty practice we can fight with the first amendment. And we should.
Right, I feel like this should be fairly simple, though I’m notsure. A daily snapshot or something that pulls everything into a database and tracks changes. I’m sure on the admin side they have all of the information, but it needs to be public.
I mean a naive approach is to just run a script that cats the whole page every 10s and compares it against the previous version, and keep all the changes in some kind of git repo.
Then have a website be the resulting merge of all those commits.
Or something.
did none of you actually read the post you’re commenting on?
what a silly question, no of course not.
there’s a git repo linked right there in the post.
Ironically, there isn’t a single question in this entire comment thread before your own.
my friend, the very first sentence from YOU that started this thread ends in a question mark.
That’s basically what they did in the article. Maybe ProPublica could make this info public down the line, they obviously have the capability.