I looked at a dataset entitled “Arrest Data from 2010 to Present.” Bundled up in this dataset’s initial ontology is its categorization in the filter, “A Safe City,” which really condenses the dataset’s liberal conception of how the carceral state functions to actually preserve order and establish safety. This of course sounds tonally dissonant when confronted with the fact that LA has the largest jail system in the country and spends millions of dollars policing and incarcerating people. The dataset’s ontology is arranged accordingly with the Police Department’s filing system, creating a structure that is easiest for people in the department to read, having access to this filing system. Each record has a Report ID that represents the incident of arrest as well as the person arrested. There is a date, time, and locative component that marks each record, as well as a categorization of the person’s age, sex, and charge. We can also use the data to find that there were 1,149,494 arrests recorded since 2010, according to the dataset.
The ontology of the dataset cannot be divorced from its situated-ness in LA’s massive carceral system that discriminates against and brutalizes so many. As for the presence of this dataset on the lacity website, it is a positive step in the direction of transparency. But what good is transparency if the county is still able to utilize their power with such unrestrained authority, inflicting so much damage upon communities? In describing what gets left out of the data, we might say it is for the better that the arrestee’s identity and precise location is left out, for privacy reasons. But, we might also find that the withholding of the police officer’s identity is a conscious choice, or the presence of any claims made by the arrestee of mistreatment. To imagine another mode of ontology, one might build a dataset where the power in the relationship is inverted, where individuals arrested get to fill in the data/experience of their arrest, giving the ID number of the officer involved. We have little in our imagination that confronts the lack of agency and voice given to those within the confines of the prison system.