Fwd: [open-gov] Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public

[Brian Fending]

This is an interesting case of the *opposite* of opendata happening in Milwaukee. Without the references, this would be an anecdote. With them, however, it's what happens without civic hackers. Inspiring, in a way.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Knauss <dan.k...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 10:10 PM
Subject: [open-gov] Milwaukee Police maintaining effective information blackouts over City Hall, Press and Public
To: open-go...@googlegroups.com

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. 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open Government" group.
To post to this group, send email to open-go...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to open-governme...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-government?hl=en.