The Scary Potential of Generative AI on Content

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Around the time of the George Floyd situation, everyone was feeling incredibly frustrated and wanted to contribute in some way to the massive issue of police brutality and misconduct.

Serendipitously, in the months before that, I had been working on a content idea for a site called Lawsuit.org, owned by Fractl. The goal was to come up with something interesting and newsworthy. I realized through some Fractl work that my local county has a database of all arrest and traffic stop records.

This was fascinating because it could be used as a dataset to understand what’s happening in your county and how police are interacting with the population, like who they’re arresting, where, and the demographic information of those arrested.

We undertook a large scraping project to gather all the data we could from Palm Beach County, looking at police activities, anomalies, and if certain officers had disproportionately high arrest rates of African American people. While we found some anomalies, nothing was super groundbreaking. However, it proved that you could scrape a county’s police data and identify potential issues.

I published this on Hacker News, Reddit, and other platforms. The content did really well, especially on Reddit, likely due to its coincidence with the George Floyd situation. People were looking for tangible ways to contribute.

I suggested on Reddit the idea of doing this for every county, not just Palm Beach County. The concept was to build a system aggregating county-level information from police departments across the United States, allowing citizen journalists and others to explore local police activity and data. This would be a large, involved process due to the varied and often antiquated systems counties use to make data available online.

The idea was to start an open-source, nonprofit initiative to write scrapers for these locations, build a database of where this data exists in every county, and push for better access to public information for deeper analysis.

The Reddit post went viral, leading to a Slack group where about 2,500 people joined in a few days. It self-organized from there, with little input from me after the first few weeks, turning into a community. A law firm helped turn it into a nonprofit, which received $250,000 in funding. Now, it’s a legitimate nonprofit, which I’m not involved in day-to-day, but it’s working towards making police data more available and understandable, ultimately helping people understand what’s going on more effectively.

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Creating content that is truly adding new and newsworthy information, which requires doing some sort of data analysis.

You need to create something really that hasn’t existed before, and that is adding value in an entirely new way.

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I love how dynamic it is. I love how quickly it changes.

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I think for the more advanced stuff, you’re going to find the most interesting, cutting-edge stuff inside of closed groups.

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• Police Data Accessibility Project
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