Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user Drewski2112 Earlier this month, Derek Willis twittered that the Metro Police Department had stripped crime incident narratives from its public data feed. Former District resident Ben Walsh noticed and decided to find out why. The reason? MPD manager of Internet communications Kaylin Castelli blames listserves.

As Walsh mentions on his blog, palewire, he fired a couple of emails over to the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. OCTO kicked it straight to MPD, and they had answers in short order—essentially hanging the problem on listservs. As Castelli explains:

The narrative information was originally brought into question early January 2009, when some detailed information was released publically on one of the district email discussion groups (aka “listserv”). Chief Lanier instructed the district email discussion group administrators to stop posting narrative information to ensure no personal victim information was released. At the same time, staff was instructed to investigate ways that the crime information could easily be posted to the email discussion groups while maintaining victims’ privacy.

From there it was decided that data could be scrubbed “clean” by the Research and Analysis Division, that is, edited to exclude any personal identification information that could be used by listservs to identify victims. (This, as stated, is the core problem: Listserv users are taking public data and using them to identify victims.)

MPD Chief Cathy Lanier then decided that this data-scrubbing process was too costly. Instead, MPD would make incident data public and keep the narratives to themselves. The Department’s press release on the revision to crime data summary information can be found here.

The part about data-scrubbing being costly, I definitely believe. But like Walsh, I’m skeptical that MPD was forced to revise its data-release policy at departmental level to protect victims’ identities from listservs. For one thing, Castelli says that, so far, there hasn’t been a real problem: “There have been incidents in the past when a victim name or specific address was released publically [sic]. While no one was injured in these incidents, we don’t intend to wait for a tragedy to occur before we find a better solution.”

That “in the past” qualifier rings out. Was an incident caused because a listserv used crime narrative data to reveal a victim’s name or address? Is the problem for which they’re searching for a better solution the fact that public data are being scrutinized in a public forum or that the narrative data the police provide are too revealing? How are the narratives more revealing than the who, what, when, and where of an incident—information the MPD is still obligated to provide?

Walsh has a number of other questions about the alleged listserv incidents and the review process by which Chief Lanier decided to strip the narratives from public data. More questions arise about the legality of this decision. MPD asserts that they are not legally compelled to make public narrative data, but of course, they are compelled to provide that information when a citizen goes to the station and asks for it.

So the MPD is making it harder for the public to come by this information. I wonder what compelled the MPD to make it available in the first place.