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Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public
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Dan Knauss  
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 More options Dec 7 2010, 10:10 pm
From: Dan Knauss <dan.kna...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 19:10:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public
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The attached PDF is a Milwaukee alderman's statement in reaction to the
discovery a week after the fact of a major fight at a local high school
where guns were recovered and an extraordinary number of arrests were
made by a massive police response.

MPD has effectively suppressed numerous major crime incidents and
public interest news this year since it moved to an encrypted IP-based
radio system without providing an alternative to the press for their
traditional use of scanners. That much is virtually confirmed by the
police spokesperson's response to the alderman's complaint. Here she
indicates that a single web page with scrolling 14 character dispatch
summaries that briefly appear and disappear with no retrieval function
are all the press needs:
http://city.milwaukee.gov/DailyNewsArchives/2010December/MPD-Shares-F...

Even local and national efforts to screen-scrape local crime and
policing data like these dispatch logs (e.g. Spotcrime.com) have been
thwarted at times by mysterious outages. (5pm Friday 9am Monday/Tuesday
outages on major summer holiday weekends.)

Please pass this information to anyone involved in tech or other
journalism who might be interested in this story. I would be happy to
supply them with facts and sources.

  08-Tech news blackout statement.pdf
125K Download

 
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Dan Knauss  
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 More options Jan 11 2011, 12:23 pm
From: Dan Knauss <dan.kna...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:23:15 -0800 (PST)
Local: Tues, Jan 11 2011 12:23 pm
Subject: Re: Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public
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[You can imagine where this will lead in cities that don't specifically
mandate real transparency protocols relevant to public, web-accessible
databases.]

Here's a news release from Public Engines/CrimeReports.com regarding the
lawsuit settlement with ReportSee/SpotCrime.com:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/public-engines-inc-announces-...

There are many things wrong with the statements in here, like the idea that
"transparency" means police department's totally control the information
they release.

Or the idea that "general public" excludes news organizations.

The way CrimeReports works in their contracts with PDs, neither the general
public nor any news organization are permitted to hold the crime data and
reproduce it.

Many police agencies around the country are removing their public police
blotter and replacing it with proprietary crime mapping that has massive
usage restrictions.

This is not a move towards transparency.


 
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