{"id":934,"date":"2016-10-17T10:52:19","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T17:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=934"},"modified":"2016-10-17T10:52:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T17:52:45","slug":"blog-post-3-la-police-expenditures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/17\/blog-post-3-la-police-expenditures\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post #3: LA Police Expenditures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office website, I was able to access\u00a0the dataset for Los Angeles Police Expenditures<\/a>. The dataset includes a myriad of data types, including the ID Number, Fiscal Year, Department Name, Vendor Name, Transaction Date, Dollar Amount, Authority, Business Tax Registration Certificates, Government Activity, Fund Group, Fund Type, Fund Name, Account Name, Transaction ID, Expenditure Type, Settlement \/ Judgement, Fiscal Month Number, Fiscal Year Quarter, Calendar Month Number, Calendar Month \/ Year, Calendar Month, Data Source, Authority Name, and Authority Link. The record in this particular dataset is the sum of police expenditures for the city of Los Angeles, spanning June 2011 to January 2014. This sum totals up to nearly 4.9 billion dollars. <\/span><\/p>\n

Wallack and Srinivasan would go on to describe ontology as \u2018the distinct systems of categories and their interrelations by which groups order and manage information about the people, places, and events around them\u2019. By this definition, a particular ontology works to build and enact paradigms within a social demographic and situate knowledge within a community. The Police Expenditures dataset collects and organizes information related to all police expenses and funds. Access to this dataset grants the Los Angeles community some level of clarity in relation to the LAPD. After parsing through this mass amount of data, citizens may develop a better sense of what funds are allocated where, and what gets prioritized by local law enforcement. A benign example being – how much is spent on veterinary funds, vs. how much is spent on training programs.
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\n<\/span>I found a major pitfall of the dataset to be its ambiguity. The spreadsheet is general and unspecific, pointing often to large monetary units categorized simply as \u201cgeneral funds\u201d or \u201csupplies\u201d. Because of the dataset\u2019s vague format, I\u2019m inclined to believe the information is organized in a way decipherable primarily to those familiar with the rhetoric of L.A. law enforcement bureaucracy. Speaking as an L.A. resident and common citizen, I\u2019m pretty lost on what the expansive term \u201csupplies\u201d might entail. I might be interested in knowing how much the city spends\u00a0on firearms, vs. how much is spent on body cameras. After moving through such a considerable amount of data, I find myself still a little lost as to what is supposedly being “illuminated” by the data.\u00a0The dataset seems to offer the facade of accountability– numbers, vendors, years, etc., while in reality\u00a0revealing nothing citizens probably didn’t already know.\u00a0If I were to rebuild this dataset, I would format the information in a way that is intuitive and legible to average L.A residents. This might mean specificity, or the creation of new fund and expenditure types.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using the L.A. Controller\u2019s Office website, I was able to access\u00a0the dataset for Los Angeles Police Expenditures. The dataset includes a myriad of data types, including the ID Number, Fiscal … Continue reading “Blog Post #3: LA Police Expenditures”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}