Get that data

Andrew Ba Tran | @abtran

We'll need to think critically for these exercises

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Two ways to write a data story

1. Start with the data

Analyze/Interview it for insights

Two ways to write a data story

2. Start with a question that can only be answered with data

Question?

How can we document speeding cops?

Ideas

GPS devices?

Nope. Tech too new and police departments fought it

Ideas

Toll tags!

What does information does it theoretically track?

Florida’s toll system, SunPass, records the date, location and time down to the hundredth of a second when a car passes through a toll booth.

How do you calculate speed?

FOIA success

1.1 million toll transactions

3,900 South Florida police transponders

About a month into the driving and number crunching, we realized we were onto something big and decided to expand the story, examining the consequences of police speeding and the culture of brotherhood that allows it to happen. Database specialist Dana Williams analyzed seven years of accident reports and found that speeding cops in Florida had caused 320 crashes, killing and maiming at least 21 people. Only one officer went to jail – for 60 days. The crash data provided another angle – that police officers receive special treatment. Of the accidents blamed on police speeding, only 12 percent of the officers were ticketed. By contrast, 55 percent of other motorists who were speeding when they crashed received a citation. To explore the culture and attitude toward speeding, we requested police internal affairs complaints and investigations. Those showed a clear pattern: speeding at many Florida police agencies wasn’t taken seriously unless it resulted in tragedy, and punishment for driving at excessive speeds was as slight as a verbal or written reminder to obey the speed limit.

The human element

Data is everywhere

Just have to get it somehow

Data is everywhere

It's on your phone

Gather it yourself

Send out a survey and then analyze and visualize the results

Is this making a difference?

Maybe

Yes, data is more abundant than before
Yes, the technology is out there to work with it, attracting more people to dig into it than ever before
But data doesn't grow on trees
Someone had to usually dig it up and clean it
Someone probably had to fight to make it public

Alright, this is the data part. What they did was they got all the directories and made a spreadsheet of the priests who were labeled out on sick leave That took them weeks to do. What wasn't in the movie was that someone had come up with that idea earlier, but they didn't think of focusing just on sick leave. They thought about shipping boxes of books to India and letting them manually type it up into spreadsheets for them. The price quote they got was like $600,000. Remember, this was the early 2000s. The internet was a new thing and people didnt have online directories. My point is, today, thanks to more modern technology, I could've scanned those documents and written a script in R to extract all the documents in a matter of days. The only hard part would be scanning it into a machine. So back to Spotlight. They were able to get a list of priests that might or might not be being moved due to illicit behavior.

Data worth fighting for

Data can be used to make institutions accountable
It can lead to an expose, it can lead to new laws and regulations

If you're hiding something or don't want regulations, you're going to make getting that data as difficult as possible