1. 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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  2. Now you can request information from the Police Federation of England and Wales

    The Police Federation of England and Wales is the latest body to be added to WhatDoTheyKnow.

    Thanks to the Policing and Crime Act 2017, which came into force on January 31, the Federation is now subject to Freedom of Information. That means that if you make a request for information which they hold, under most circumstances they must provide it.

    These new responsibilities were announced by Theresa May back in 2014 when she was Home Secretary:

    I will bring forward proposals to make the Police Federation – that is, the national organisation and all the regional branches – subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

    I know that some of you will find these changes unpalatable. In particular, I know that some of you will find the Freedom of Information Act an unwelcome intrusion. But the Police Federation is an organisation created by statute, it serves a public function and the Normington Review demonstrated very clearly that it is an organisation in need of greater transparency and accountability. So it is a change that I believe needs to be made.

    Whether it was found unpalatable or not — it happened. Accordingly, that’s now reflected on WhatDoTheyKnow, so if you have a burning question for the Federation, now is the time to ask.


    Image: CodyR (CC by/2.0)

  3. Transparency in policing – WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer talks to ACPO

    Police by Aaron van Dorn

    Many mySociety projects rely on a team of volunteers to keep them going. FixMyTransport, WhatDoTheyKnow and Pledgebank may look like very simple sites that run themselves, but the truth is that there’s a lot of human intervention going on behind the scenes, keeping the wheels oiled.

    Our volunteer teams deal with masses of site admin, they discuss policies and future development, and they give advice to our users. They may also go and talk about our projects in the wider community, and this is what WhatDoTheyKnow volunteer, Richard Taylor, did recently when he addressed the Association of Chief Police Officers at the “Transparency in UK Policing” event.

    Richard has written about his experience here; I am linking to it because, as well as giving a good introduction to WhatDoTheyKnow within a policing context, it also explains exactly what sort of work the WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers do routinely, and the kind of issues that are discussed within the team. It might just make you value our volunteers more, or it might pique your interest in becoming one yourself.

    If that latter applies, you can find out more about volunteering for WhatDoTheyKnow here, or about the ways you can help across all mySociety projects here. But either way, I encourage you to go and read Richard’s post.

    Photo by Aaron van Dorn (CC)

  4. Changes to public authorities today

    National Health Service changes in England

    Today (1st April 2013) marks a significant change in the way that the NHS in England is structured.  Strategic Health Authorities (SHA) & Primary Care Trusts (PCT) are abolished, and their responsibilities are being taken on by newly created Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG), the National Commissioning Board, Public Health England and local authorities.

    The split is roughly along these lines:

    • Clinical Commissioning Groups commission elective hospital care, urgent and emergency care, community healthcare and mental healthcare & learning disability services for the local areas they cover
    • The National Commissioning Board covers primary care contracting (GP Contracting, Dental, Pharmacy), specialised services, offender healthcare, secure mental health care and some armed forces healthcare
    • “Top-tier” and unitary Local Authorities take on responsibilities for these aspects of public health: sexual health services, drug and alcohol treatment, health checks, school nursing programmes, giving up smoking programmes and services to prevent childhood obesity
    • Public Health England is a national body which will work closely with local authorities’ public health teams, carrying out a range of activities to protect and improve the nation’s health, eg to co-ordinating work to combat infectious diseases such as flu or infections acquired in hospitals such as MRSA, or to carry out national publicity campaigns to prevent ill health

    This means quite a bit of change to the public authority listings on WhatDoTheyKnow:

    1) PCTs and SHAs are now marked as “defunct” to prevent new requests from being made (see below for more details).

    2) We’ve now listed all the new CCGs, but we’re missing email addresses for around 15% of them.  It’s clear that many CCGs are not quite ready to welcome FOI requests.  Even though they went live today, there are a fair number of websites still under construction (I’ve seen lots of “lorem ipsum” text today), with no contact details.  We aim to get these all up-to-date in the next few weeks as they get up to speed.

    3) The National Commissioning Board and Public Health England have been added to the site

    4) We’ll be adding local Health and Wellbeing Boards, Healthwatch organisations & Local Education & Training Boards soon.

    Police Service changes in Scotland

    Under the banner of reducing duplication and cost-saving (BBC article), police services in Scotland are being completely re-organised with 2 new central bodies replacing all the regional police forces and boards:

    Fire Service changes in Scotland

    Similar changes are taking place with Scotland’s fire services:

    Other joiners & leavers…

    The following is a round-up of other changes taking place today…

    Say hello to:

    And goodbye to:

    And although they’re officially changing, it’s pretty much business as usual for:

    Defunct public authorities

    We flag old public bodies that no longer exist as “defunct” to prevent new requests from being made.  In most circumstances FOI officers transfer across in-flight requests to the relevant replacement authority.  If you need to follow-up a request to a defunct public body (e.g. if there’s no further contact from an authority), the website will let you, however the “old” authority is no longer under any obligation to reply.  You may need to re-send your request to a new public authority which will restart the 20-day clock…

    Please help us!

    Given the scale of change, if you find any incorrect information for these public authority listings, please let us know!  Also please get in touch if you find an email address for any of those we’re still on the hunt for…