California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, on Tuesday announced legislation that would convert annual crime reports into machine-readable data sets made public on the Department of Justice's open data website.
The "Crime in California" reports include statistics such as arrest numbers, complaints against police officers, law enforcement officers killed or assaulted, and more, the department said. The legislation, AB 2524, would require local law enforcement agencies to submit this data to the state in a digital format; 60 percent of them currently send this information through paper forms, the Department of Justice said.
“Data and technology have the power to dramatically increase transparency and accountability in our criminal justice system,” Harris said in a statement. “This legislation will bring criminal justice data reporting into the 21st century. I thank Assemblymember Irwin for standing with me to support the adoption of technology by law enforcement.”
"Right now we are sitting on mountains of valuable criminal justice data that local law enforcement work hard to provide in the public interest. We need to make sure that this information is available to the public and that we are using it effectively. AB 2524 is a common-sense measure that will help bring California into the 21st century,” Irwin said.
On March 14, AB 2524 was amended in the Assembly and referred to the Committee on Public Safety. The bill initially was introduced on Feb. 19.
Last month the California Department introduced version 1.1 of its OpenJustice data portal. The platform consists of two components: a dashboard that shows key criminal justice indicators with user-friendly visualization tools and an open data portal that publishes raw data from the California Department of Justice’s statewide repository of criminal justice data sets.
