Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public

[Dan Knauss]

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-Facts-on-Bradley-Te.htm

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. 

[Dan Knauss]

[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-permanent-injunction-in-settlement-with-reportsee-inc-operator-of-spotcrimecom-and-mylocalcrimecom-113268634.html

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.