By Denice Ross, Presidential Innovation Fellow

Rising ninth-grader Demond Fortenberry opened his first city data set: “Use of Force” records created by the Public Integrity Bureau at the New Orleans Police Department. As part of a three-day event engaging youth to build apps on top of soon-to-be released policing data sets, he was one of the first New Orleanians to ever see these records.

With just 10 hours of coding class under his belt, Demond cautiously scrolled through the data. Horizontally and vertically. He read out the attributes as he went.

Male. Male. Male. Female. Black. Black. White. White. Eight years employment on the police force. Age: 19 years. Age: 42. Taser. Canine. Handgun.

As he began to get his data sea-legs, Demond talked about the patterns he noticed. He looked up one of the incident locations on the web — and nodded when he recognized the gas station where the use of force had occurred. He started to ask questions.

Why do all of the addresses end in zeros? Were there really nine 29-year-old residents involved in this single event?

Normally, such questions might go unanswered. But on this day, the City’s Chief Information Officer was in the room. CIO Lamar Gardere — himself a graduate of the Demond’s high school — came over and sat down.

Demond Fortenberry and City of New Orleans CIO Lamar Gardere review police data together with other hackathon participants. (Photo by the author)

Addresses are rounded to zero for privacy issues, Lamar explained. As for the nine 29-year-olds? The answer was more complicated. Draft releases of open data are always a little rough around the edges, so Lamar said he’d bring Demond’s question back to City Hall for investigation. The solution could be in fixing the software to prevent duplicate entries, or releasing the right set of additional attributes to distinguish these records from one another.

Next up, 311 data

Demond moved on to the next data set: 311 calls for service. As the conversation turned to the bumpy reality of New Orleans’ poor street conditions, he scrolled past legions of unresolved requests to fix potholes.

Street light. Fallen tree. Street flooding. Recycling…

And then Demond stopped talking.

He figured out how to filter the 311 requests by neighborhood. Gentilly Terrace. Then he sorted by request type. His face lit up with a huge smile as his finger pointed to a single row in this very large data set.