Getting Started

Data Links

• Website put together by the Invisible Institute visualizing their complaint data.
• Github repository of the code and data available from the Invisible Institute.
• Code Ocean repository for the Ba et al. 2021 paper on diversity in policing.
• Link to Ba et al. 2021 paper.

Join officers to officer-work assignments

1. Ba et al. 2021 engage in a number of data cleaning steps related to officer-work assignments:
   1. They drop any officers (and their subsequent work assignments) who are not White, Black, or Hispanic.
   2. They drop any officer-work assignments where the rank of the officer is not Police Officer.
   3. They claimed to have dropped non-standard assignments (e.g., protest detail, station supervisor, or station security). I have not found in the code where they do this.
   4. They claimed to have dropped any work assignments in which the officer is indicated as non-present. I assume this is because the officer was sick, on vacation, being disciplined/rewarded, or some other reason? This may have been done in an earlier processing step that is not available in their code/data repository because all officer-work assignments have at least one associated officer. There is no column indicating if the officer was present or not.
   5. They say they do not include non-standard watches (i.e., any officer-work assignment which did not occur between first and third shift). This must have been done in an earlier processing step that is not available in their code/data repository because all officer-work assignments already take place between the first and third shift.
   6. They say they drop double and triple duty work assignments (an officer working consecutive work assignments). I have not found in the code where they do this.
   7. One can find their discussion of these cleaning steps on pages 7-8 of the Appendix (sections S1.4 and S1.5).
2. We engage in the following data cleaning steps:
   1. We keep officers of all races/ethnicities.
   2. We keep officer-work assignments of all ranks.
   3. We keep non-standard assignments due to a lack of knowledge of how to identify non-standard assignments.
   4. We implicitly drop work assignments in which the officer is indicated as non-present (if we are correct in assuming Ba et al. have already done this).
   5. We implicitly drop non-standard watches (if we are correct in assuming Ba et al. have already done this).
   6. We keep double and triple duty work assignments.