Apr. 18—The Norman Police Department found an unlikely ally to help it process raw data, the University of Oklahoma's Computer Science Department.
The OU School of Computer Science has worked alongside the NPD to improve data visualization options for a public database wherein students are building a system to turn raw data into sortable tables, charts and graphs.
Mansoor Abdulhak, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, is managing a team of students to help with the process, which started last semester.
"Our school is trying to engage our students with the industry so they can do their capstone based on real projects with mentors in the industry," Abdulhak said.
He said the partnership serves both the NPD and computer science students, as the police need people to process data, and students need projects to graduate.
"Our students are proudly developing a visualization system for the public to be able to visualize the data that they care about so they will have more awareness of what's happening in the community, and that's something we're very proud of," he said.
John Stege, former sergeant who manages NPD's open data initiative, said it needs help from the public to make data more transparent.
"This is to make it more consumable for the general public," Stege said. "They've been building this from the ground up. They are trying to get charts and data and visualization models, and they are not really looking at what the data says. This is a coding project."
Stege also said his department benefits from this partnership because it saves taxpayers money.
"The software that can do that is pretty expensive, and it's an ongoing expense," Stege said. "The care and feeding of that kind of software, it's a heavy lift to get it up and running."
Lexie Barthelemess, a senior at OU, is on one of the two teams working on the project and started looking at the data at the beginning of this semester. She said the NPD has compiled a "ton" of data, which is available on its website.
"It was in something called a CSV format, which is basically just a bunch of data separated by a comma, it's not easy to read at all," Barthelemess said. "Our scope was not about being able to analyze this data, it is about being able to transform the data from its current state so it will be able to be used by researchers, community members, and people that don't have the ability to code and make graphs."
Stege described CSV files as rudimentary Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with no separators.
Abdulhak said examples of data include how many calls the department gets per day, or which parts of the city are more likely to experience accidents or traffic stops.
"All these types of data points will be very useful on a daily basis for our community," he said.
Barthelemess said OU is analyzing 200,000 points of data.
"Pretty much anything that goes on in the Norman Police Department is recorded for public record," she said. "Whatever you're looking for, in reference to the NPD, is going to be available on this website we've created."
She said the website has already been created, but has not yet been launched for public access. Barthelemess said it will be ready within the next six months.
"You can track the number of calls going on in the police department every year, and see how it fluctuates from year-to-year," she said. "Or if an event happens at OU or some other place, you can see what kinds of crimes are spiking."
Barthelemess said the website will be hosted by the NPD.
"All they have to do is upload that data from year-to-year, and then our graphs will update accordingly," she said. "We have been working on this all semester. We're at the point that our development is stable, so we consider it to be production ready."
She said her teams have nearly finished compiling this batch of graphs and is about to hand it off to the NPD, whose IT department will upload the data when it is ready.
Stege said he looks forward to having the public, including scholars, look at the data. He said his department needs a fresh set of eyes to look at it and offer suggestions on how to improve different city outcomes.
"At the police department, we are looking for the impact of crime, so we see our data with the goal of accomplishing the goal of increasing safety," Stege said. "Not everyone looks at the data through that lens, so it is 100% helpful when other people use their own lens to look at it.
Brian King covers education and politics for The Transcript. Reach him at bking@normantranscript.com.
