NYPD Civilian Complaints Story

This project was an exercise in hard-coding visualizations using D3.js, a tool that was completely new to me. While challenging, focusing on learning one tool throughout the duration of my research helped me apply critical perspectives to my work.

I wanted to approach my research with the goal of illuminating gaps in the system that helps keep law enforcement officers accountable. I obtained data from the Legal Aid Society's Law Enforcement Lookup Tool to gain insight into the process of internal discipline within the NYPD. The Civilian Complaint Review Board accepts submissions from New Yorkers who feel that an officer has acted out of their line of duty to wrongfully cause harm. Through my research, I discovered that a large majority of complaints to the CCRB go unaddressed, due to current laws on statutes of limitation and a lack of government funding for the bureau — even after the repeal of a law that previously concealed this information.

This project required a significant amount of data cleaning, which I handled using Jupyter Notebooks and OpenRefine. To create the final deliverable, I coded visualizations using D3.js and built the front-end interface using Reveal.js. See the final version here.