Show HN: Palo Alto Police Arrest Reports | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Palo Alto Police Arrest Reports

paloaltopolice.org

9 pointsbrianhama8 comments

Extracts case reports from Palo Alto Police department's daily pdf files and displays cases on a map and in a table on the web.

Source code and background on GitHub: brianhama/palo-alto-police-case-reports

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For Dallas PD active calls:

Screenshots: https://vgy.me/album/v8fzwq7Z

crontab: https://snippet.host/ymeofo

DB schema (which I'm sure could use some refinement, lol): https://snippet.host/fiyxhr

query one-liners: https://snippet.host/vouqax

Also of interest, a similar site for SF.[0]

[0]https://sfpdcalls.com/

I’d never seen that site before. It’s nice that SF makes that data available in such a friendly format.

There used to be various sites that allowed you to listen in on the SFPD frequencies, but they switched to a digital version that you'd have to crack, and they're not handing out access to it

Palo Alto started encrypting the police radio a few years ago, but a new chief of police was hired last year and reversed the decision and made it public again. Palo Alto cares more about transparency than the average city though.

Whoah.. name, surname, date of birth.

I know that USA doesn't have anything as strong as EU has with GDPR (or EU DPR), but damn.. arresting someone doesn't mean that they are guilty, so why out them? Wouldn't it make more sense to have these records public after a conviction?

I agree. I’ve always found it strange that mug shots and arrest information are public.

> arresting someone doesn't mean that they are guilty, so why out them

Indeed, they are not guilty and the problem lies with the assumption that they must be guilty because they were arrested. It being a matter of public record that (and where/when/why) they were arrested means their loved ones can know what happened to them when they don't come home (even if that means they have to find the answer themselves, though ideally they wouldn't).

Just consider someone very close to you is arrested but there is no public record of that arrest for you to follow up on. What do you do?

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