By Tom Moran and Jane Gaertner
Thanks to an initiative by Jane Gaertner, the Criminal Justice Reform Task Force (CJR-TF) sought and was granted a team of four interns from the Rutgers MBS track to help us design and build a database that will house data that is currently available to the public from the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General (AG). These databases are the Use of Force Database and the Arrive Together Database. These databases are currently presented to the public in various ways; however, in any of these forms, it is hard for anyone, expert or novice, to run a straightforward query on either database and get back data in a concise, easy-to-understand format. One of the main goals of this project is to rectify that situation.
On the FaithAction side, Jane Gaertner is serving as project manager and institutional systems expert on the project. Avron Stoloff is serving as a data analyst, data architect, and database development resource. Tom Moran is helping to choose the database engine and platform architecture, providing some database development help, and general advice. Rev. Charles Loflin serves as the platform manager for the FaithAction data and web platforms.
The Interns, James Caci, Ayaan Ahmed, and Reuben Thomas, are MBS students, while the 4th intern, Omar Youssef, is an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science and Data Science. James Caci is the project lead for the MBS Externship team. James coordinates communication among all parties. The MBS Externship Advisors, Zachary Winston and Dr. Joey Liu, are participants in our weekly meetings, have experience in data analytics, and regularly contribute to the project.
The project has four phases: Design, Development, Testing, and Implementation/Release. We hope and expect to have completed these four phases by the end of the summer program on August 11.
In the completed project, we will host at least the Use of Force database on the UU FaithAction website and make it available to the public as an extension and alternative to the AG’s databases. Given the database architecture, it will be possible to host the same query forms and reports on websites other than the FaithAction website.
Conversation with impacted people suggests that there is considerable interest in being able to query the Use of Force Database for information about incidents of interest. We note here that the data we are discussing is already available online to the general public; it is just that it is in a form that is not well-suited to routine queries.
Tom Moran, speaking to the interns in the second meeting, indicated that this work will provide a substantial public good by making this data more readily available. In addition to the general public, groups interested in analyzing data on the use of force should have a better-conditioned dataset to draw from.
This is a new kind of undertaking for FaithAction, and we hope that it yields a straightforward public good. We plan additional steps, based on this database redesign as a foundation.