Police Data Accessibility Project Inc

PDAP aims to be an independent, complete, and universally trusted source of information about United States Law Enforcement.

We're open-source, meaning all of our code is publicly available on GitHub.

We're committed to maintaining a "bright line" between the source material and our published databases.

We're decentralizing the work of data scraping, allowing communities to form organically around types of data or regions. This balances the massive scale of the problem against our limited resources. People with particular expertise or interest can take ownership over a domain, and use our tools to moderate and audit each other's work.

Our board represents expertise in cybersecurity, the intersection between public and private sector technology, open-source development, large-scale data discovery, and more.

One of our paid staff is an experienced digital Product Owner with a background in multidisciplinary user-centered design. They are equipped to turn feedback from all stakeholders (data consumers; municipal data publishers; volunteers; technical partners) into a cohesive development strategy to make software that is as useful as possible.

The other is a seasoned journalist turned Software Engineer. Aside from having the skills needed to build excellent software to empower and support our users, he has a professional network which covers every type of stakeholder and will support development into the future.

We have worked as volunteers to develop experimental scrapers, and collected feedback from hundreds of experts in our online community. This has allowed us to define the scope of our initial efforts and software releases, as well as build the foundation for a community of transparency-minded experts and volunteers.

We have received a substantial grant which has allowed us to hire two staff, adding the full-time effort of two paid employees to the project for the first time.