Recently I was searching around for publicly available police data and found that a surprising amount of data is available to the public. Often it is very portable, letting the curious download raw data from government systems. Many cities have built out API’s so you can get live feeds from their systems. I found a treasure trove of raw arrest data from the City of Baltimore. Like a lot of cities, they have exposed their database of arrests to the public. The data only goes back to the beginning of 2013, but that’s a lot.
Since the first of day of 2013, Baltimore City police have made 152,103 arrests as of September 30th, 2017. That works out to an average of 87 arrests per day. That does not sound like a big number, but according to studies, the average time awaiting trial is close to 40 days. The number of people being held in the city awaiting trial is about 8,000, on average. Put another way, about 1.3% of the city’s population is held at any one time, awaiting their turn in the criminal justice system. That does not included convicts.
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