mySociety and Black Thrive: Stop & Search Dashboard

Supported by the Wellcome Data Prize in Mental Health, mySociety are providing technical support to the organisation Black Thrive, whose work addresses the inequalities that negatively impact the mental health and wellbeing of Black people. Their question: does disproportional use of police stop and search impact the mental health of young Black people in England and Wales? This project aims to find out.

Late last year mySociety provided some low-key support during the Discovery phase of the project as Black Thrive were developing their statistics package to extract and enhance data from data.police.uk to make the data more accessible and research-ready (for example, by making it easier to combine the data with other datasets such as Understanding Society, a longitudinal household panel study).

We’re pleased to say that the project made an impact, and we’ll now be more actively sharing our expertise in creating data-heavy, citizen-focused services by collaborating with Black Thrive, King’s College London, and UNJUST CIC in the Prototyping phase of the Data Prize.

Now that Black Thrive have built an automated way of gathering the data and creating the analysis, the next phase focuses on presenting these in an open dashboard that’s straightforward for anyone to use and understand. We’ll also be looking at mechanisms for automatically keeping the data up to date, and adding new datapoints when they become available.

Having built several dashboards into our own services including WhatDoTheyKnow and FixMyStreet, we’ve got some great experience to build off; plus bags of experience in sourcing and munging lots of disparate data from our EveryPolitician project. More recently we’ve been making local council Climate Action Plans explorable and accessible, and also creating an easy-to-use data hub for data about local MPs, constituencies, public opinion and the climate and nature movement so this project sits comfortably within our wheelhouse.

In fact, as it happens, we’re currently using very similar tech on another project, our Local Intelligence Hub prototype, and we’re going to use it as the basis for this new dashboard. Nothing like a bit of crafty repurposing where it helps save time and effort! 

Here’s a sneak peek of how it’s looking at this early stage:

Black Thrive Stop & Search Dashboard proof of concept using the Local Intelligence Hub prototype

Watch this space and we’ll be sure to keep the updates coming as we progress.

Image: Chris White (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)


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