Keeping Our Eyes on Policing
Blue Witness
There have been a flood of new reports in police force being using in the United States. It can be hard to navigate through it all, especially for journalists looking to increase public awareness. In association with Human Rights First, a non-profit organization, Blue Witness is an app that will solve this problem and allow easier access to reported police force around the continental U.S. I was honored to be part of a team full-stack web developers and data scientists whose mission was to prepare this app for release.
Going into this project we wanted to give users a display of the data we received as accurate as possible and we wanted to collect as much as possible. Each report is tagged with an appropriate rank of force, as well as the time and location of the incident. Sources are provided by our Twitter Bot that scans for new reports of police force. The data is given a confidence rating and when this rating is low our bot will reach out and ask for more information.
Making it look good
The Blue Witness app allows for journalists and curious minds to easily look at the data we’ve collected. Some adjustments we made to the product included the functionality of filtering data by state and how our graphs responded. It is now easy to know exactly how many reports there are and how the force ranks are distributed in these incidents.
My role as a front-end developer was to build, maintain, and fix the user interface so that it was easy to view and filter reports of police force.
As a team we ran into many problems of styles that didn’t match, features that weren’t operating properly, and many more things that required us to dive deep into our code. Many of us had never used Ant Design and so it was important for us to go over the documentation and fully understand what styling was in place and how to implement changes.
The data our Twitter bot collects is currently ranked and tagged manually. This is done on an incident labeler page accessible by the site admins. This page looked really simple and difficult to read when it was first implemented. Our team was able to give it a face lift with some fresh CSS.
On the home page of Blue Witness, users are introduced to the interactive map. This is where we provide users with the data they are looking for a glance. Whenever a user wants a closer look at an area on the map, they can zoom into it and see how reports are dispersed.
We use Mapbox as a starting point for this feature and incorporate some Ant Design styling. My task for this map was to improve on the zoom transitions and to adjust the clusters so that they appropriately circled the locations according to the amount of reports.
To address styling inconsistencies within our app, I was able match colors across the incident reports page according the color our stakeholder wanted for the site. I also made adjustments to the map clusters so that they more accurately display what the amount of reports in an area, and when zooming in on them, it is a smooth transition. This was accomplished by manipulating Ant Designs style library and utilizing the Mapbox documentation.
State of Blue Witness
With a team of developers this size and with a product this far into development, communication was key to success. Throughout the project we had team standups everyday. These allowed us to catch up with each other’s work and address any blockers that anyone was experiencing. We also had weekly product reviews in which we talked about anything technical that needed to be discussed with our team and weekly stakeholder meetings where we got to share our work with our stakeholder and ask any questions that came up during the week.
Our team improved on many existing features and implemented new ones. Currently when a user comes to our site, they can expect an easy and intuitive experience for finding any current and past reports of police force.
Going forward there is still more polishing and features that need attention. The product will be passed onto another team so that they can complete the Twitter bot that collects reports. To make this process easier for the next crew, we made it a priority to add to the documentation within the code repositories.
Blue Witness will be deployed later this year and it will make keeping track of police force in the U.S more accessible. Sometime in the future, we hope to expand the app to include rest of the world.
