Wired – “…For years, researchers, journalists, and activists have turned to official records, from incident reports to misconduct complaints, as one window into police behavior in the United States. “The problem is that all of this data, although it’s public, is buried inside of these really crappy or antiquated public records portals,” says Kristin Tynski. Few states make it easy to mass-export law enforcement data, which can make the process tedious. Some states require a formal public records request to access the documents; sometimes people have had to sue for the data. And once the data has been downloaded, it has to be cleaned, combined, and standardized to create a national data set—the kind that might help researchers find patterns of racial bias, excessive use of force, or repeat complaints of misconduct. Tynski’s group, which calls itself the Police Data Accessibility Project, aims to do just that…”