The University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) is one of the largest private police forces in the world, and has a jurisdiction that stretches well beyond the boundaries of the UChicago campus core. Over the past decade, numerous Black students and residents of surrounding communities have accused the UCPD of racially-biased policing, but since the UCPD is not accountable to FOIA, they had no way of proving this outside of anecdotal evidence. However, due to pressure from student and community activist groups like the Campaign for Equitable Policing (CEP), the UCPD finally agreed to start releasing data in June 2015 on the Traffic Stops and Field Reports made by their officers.
This data is accessible on the UChicago Safety & Security data portal; however, they only show 5 rows at a time and there are errors due to manual data entry, so part of the work required is to scrape the data and clean it up a bit.
This data has many implications - for the UCPD, for the University of Chicago, and even for the city as a whole. That's where you all come in! I would love to see what kinds of insights fellow civic hackers can glean from this data, and more broadly, raise awareness to the biased policing practices of the UCPD - a private police force not accountable to FOIA or its constituents.
I have geocoded the data using ArcGIS; you can access the geocoded shapefile on map #14 of my Story Map.
To run the web scraper, you must have python 2.7 installed. Run the webscraper/webscraper.py script with no arguments to retrieve all historical UCPD traffic stop data from the UChicago website (from 2015-06-01 to the present). By default, the data will be written to a tab-separated file at data/trafficstops.tsv, although the filename is configurable in webscraper/settings.py. Several other settings can be changed in settings.py as well--the URL to hit, start and end dates, etc.