README.md

Background

This program scores the transparency of sheriff's departments in California based on the COVID-19 data provided in response to our California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests. Please note that this does NOT score sheriff's departments' transparency pertaining to the COVID-19 data collection effort lead by the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC). For this scoring and corresponding visualizations, please see the covidincustody/data-transparency-bscc repository.

The first component of this program scores transparency based on the COVID-19 data shared by sheriff's departments in California in response to our CPRA requests. The data has been cleaned, processed and aggregated, and is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9zoEN_nI_oBAxO8k_9kd5612gCaMHSfViU-1WKVSKY/edit#gid=0. Details on the CPRA requests for information on COVID-19 cases, vaccinations, deaths and compliance with public health orders can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VQr_BHHzCEwUH93qSXlsF3V2k1r6wAxi and https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Borganization%3Acovid-in-custody-project-41520%20 (county folders visible when you create a DocumentCloud account).

The second component of this program generates visualizations of the transparency scores by data category: COVID-19 cases, vaccinations, etc.

Instructions

Download repository and modify the run.py file to reflect the appropriate read and write paths.

The read path will be the local version the county jail dataset referenced above: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9zoEN_nI_oBAxO8k_9kd5612gCaMHSfViU-1WKVSKY/edit#gid=0 (ensure that the local file contains no banners and that the first row contains the column headers). The write path will be a local path specified by the user where the transparency scores will be written in Excel format.

For simplest execution, use the Anaconda Environment (https://www.anaconda.com/products/distribution) which has the necessary modules or packages pre-installed. Navigate to either data-transparency-cpra/transparency-scores or data-transparency-cpra/visualizations and execute program as python run.py in the Anaconda terminal. Alternatively, a user can execute the modified run.py file in any Python IDE (Spyder, PyCharm, etc.) launched through the Anaconda Environment.

Please contact info@covidincustody.org with any questions or concerns.