NYC Stop and Frisk Data API

The liberation of people begins with the liberation of data


Project maintained by stopfrisknyc Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

An API to access the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop, Question, and Frisk Databases from 2003-2011, which were previously only available in proprietary database formats. Data elements include searches, stops, frisks, and the use of force, as well as demographic information about the individuals stopped under the policy.

Civil Rights and Criminal Justice are not included by the Washington Post Issue Engine API among "the 18 most important issues of the election." Our data suggest that they should be. In the first three months of 2012, 203,500 New Yorkers were stopped by the police. 181,457 were totally innocent (89 percent); 108,097 were black (54 percent); 69,043 were Latino (33 percent); 18,387 were white (9 percent).

This project developed as part of the Washington Post, NPR, and Sunlight Foundation's Election Hackathon from October 6-7, 2012. It reflects the work of multiple individuals from many organizations across many hackathons.

Take a look at a sample API response showing age, sex, race, build, crime suspected, and cross street for stops.

Contributors of the Stop and Frisk Data API

Sample Fields (Of 112 fields):

Sample Query:

http://api.occupy-data.org/v1/?results&value=crossst&value=age&value=race&value=crimsusp&value=sex&value=build&value=frisked&html=&results_per_page=100

Contents of Data repository

  1. Source databases converted from SPSS Portable files into CSV (geometry in original NY State Plane Projection)
  2. Full consolidated 2003-2011 databases as a csv file, with geometry in WGS84 (EPSG:4326) projection
  3. Original metadata from NYPD

Contents of API documentation repository

  1. Documentation