But a year after the project was launched, only 53 jurisdictions have committed to it, covering more than 41 million people. New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Montgomery County are on the list, but many others are not. As in about 17,000 others, with police jurisdictions covering more than 260 million people. The White House presented the numbers in a public briefing Friday with administration officials and police commanders.

The FBI has acknowledged that, in its national gathering of crime statistics, it does not have a reliable count of police shootings, but that won’t happen until at least 2017. So as part of the president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, two recommendations were “using open data to increase transparency, build community trust and support innovation” and “better using technology, such as early warning systems, to identify problems, increase internal accountability, and decrease inappropriate uses of force.”

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Here’s one example: The Los Angeles Police Department released a 300-page report on its use of force incidents in 2015, which you can see here. In New York, the police are placing the same CompStat crime tracking data given to police commanders on their public website, which you can see here. (Only five cars were reported stolen in Manhattan South, from 59th Street down to the Battery, the week of April 11.)

Still, 85 percent of the country’s population are not covered by participating agencies. Ron Davis, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, said the White House is still pushing the initiative and more agencies will join. “This is how any great thing that has occurred in our industry … has started,” Davis said at Friday’s briefing, according to NPR’s Martin Kaste, “with a handful of agencies that had the progressiveness and the courage to do it.” Davis added that, “We know that if you start collecting the data, that 50 today will be 100 in two months, and 200 by next year, and the question three years from now is, ‘Why would you not be having open data?'” The federal government cannot require local police agencies to do such reporting, so the program is voluntary.

The White House said Friday that it is taking more steps to encourage police departments to participate, providing not only use of force data but statistics on vehicle and pedestrian stops and dozens of other data sets. Both the Police Foundation and the International Association of Chiefs of Police committed to making it easier for police departments to compile and post their data, and private and nonprofit groups such as Socrata, Safe Software, GovDelivery and OpenGov will help local agencies with software and other potential hurdles.

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“The numbers are a good start,” said Vincent Talucci, executive director of the IACP. “If you look at the list of 53 communities, they will serve as a good test bed for agencies of all shapes and sizes. As the early adopters, these agencies will provide needed lessons learned to the broader field based on their respective policy and operational successes and challenges. The collective wisdom generated, ideally, will provide an informed way forward for those agencies interested in participating in the future.”

Here’s a list of the 53 agencies who have committed to the project so far: