John Tedesco

Texas state officials surprised when public data is posted online

Karisa King and I were cleaning our corner of the newsroom last week, and I rediscovered this gem of an e-mail written by an official for the Texas Department of Insurance.

The state agency oversees the amusement-ride industry. When a patron is seriously injured, the ride owner is supposed to report the injury to the department of insurance, and the information is typed into a database.

For a story I wrote about the safety of amusement rides, we obtained a copy of the injury database, and the Express-News posted the data online.

That disturbed at least one state official.

“Tedeso has put together a searchable database of injuries from our data,” department spokesman Jerry Hagins informed his colleagues in the July 2009 e-mail.

“Can he do this?????????” replied Richard Baker, a manager at the agency.

A question with nine question marks deserves an answer: Yes, we can do this. In fact, news organizations and blogs ought to do this.

Government agencies collect reams of data about important issues. When journalists find that data, analyze it, and share it with the public, we help readers make sense of a complicated world. That’s our mission. And that’s why news sites are publishing “data centers” with unique and useful information.

Want to learn the salary of the city manager of San Antonio? Check a public-salary database.

Curious what litterbugs have been dumping on roadways? Check the state’s “Dont Mess with Texas” database.

Wondering where it’s safe to drive in San Antonio during a downpour? Check a map of low-water crossings, which was created from a city database.

Can we post this data?

Yep.

Should we?

Absolutely.

I had always wanted to write a story about police chases after I watched a crazy high-speed pursuit unfold on local TV. I wondered how often these chases go bad, and how the San Antonio Police Department keeps track of that information.

Law enforcement agencies usually churn out paperwork for every situation known to man. I made some phone calls and learned that officers must fill out a pursuit-evaluation form after they chase someone. The reports have check boxes for different categories of information, such as whether someone was injured during the chase. When you see boxes like that on a report, chances are, some hapless soul at the government agency types that information into a database. It turned out SAPD has been compiling a database that tracks details of every chase by all its officers.

If you work for a news organization or a blog and stumble upon a previously unknown database filled with rich details about an important public policy issue, you’ve found a great story. Request a copy of the raw data and analyze it. You might be able to tell your audience something new about the world.

SAPD’s pursuit database formed the foundation for my story that ran Sunday. The numbers show that two out of five pursuits damaged cars or property. The number of chases and crashes peaked in 2008, but dropped in 2009 after SAPD emphasized vehicle safety to its officers:

Here’s a copy of the raw data for the years 2003-2009. To me the numbers highlight the difficult position officers are in during a police chase, but they managed to make progress last year.

Getting the data was important. But it didn’t tell the full story — it was missing narratives describing what happened during the chase. The narratives were written down in the hardcopy pursuit reports. So I requested copies of reports for a bunch of chases, including a pursuit that led to the most recent death of an innocent bystander in San Antonio, 85-year-old Edna Hurst:

Pursuit evaluation report of police chase by the San Antonio Police Department

I also asked for a copy of SAPD’s pursuit policy. It describes the situations in which officers are permitted to pursue suspects. The policy also mentioned that Blue Eagle, the police helicopter unit, is supposed to videotape pursuits if the helicopter is able to assist. So I asked for some videos and came across this incident involving a reckless driver of a pickup truck, which I thought was a good example showing the dynamics of how officers handle chases.

The chase database doesn’t show the location of where the pursuit begins. But it does have a case number for each chase. Using that number, Mike Howell of mySA.com linked the data to Crimebase, a gargantuan data file of offense reports we receive from SAPD. Mike made an interesting map showing where chases occurred in the city in 2009. Click on a chase, and it calls up details from the pursuit data, and a link to a Crimebase report with a brief narrative.

The point of all this work isn’t to make SAPD look bad. It’s to offer people relevant information about a life-or-death issue. I learned a lot working on this story. If we did our job right, so did our readers.

The San Antonio Police Department keeps a unique database that documents every police chase by SAPD officers. I’m working on a story that will be published Sunday that’s based on an analysis of the data. We’re examining the challenges and risks police officers face when they try to catch a suspect in a high-speed chase.

If you’re an SAPD officer or someone who’s been involved in an accident related to a police chase, feel free to contact me.

On March 26, City Hall reporter Josh Baugh got an adrenaline-pumping tip: FBI agents had seized files at the office of Fernando De León, a city official who reviewed permits for real estate development in San Antonio.

The tip sparked a frantic series of phone calls that afternoon as Josh and I tried to figure out what was going on. Authorities said they couldn’t discuss many details — there was still an active investigation, and De León hadn’t been charged with a crime. It was an understandable response, but we had to tell readers what was happening at a city department funded by their tax dollars and permit fees.

Trying to find answers in a story like this is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, only you have to go out and interview people and dig up records to find the missing pieces. And even then, you’re only going to see part of the picture. But after a lot of work, here’s the gist of what we know today:

There’s certainly far more to this story, but it’s a start. If you’re digging into a murky topic like this for a blog or news organization, here are a few tips that can help you find the missing pieces of the puzzle:

(Photo credit: liza31337)

Chasnoff

“He just looked around and said, ‘Well, maybe your husband called,’” she said.

She told him she was not married and no one could have called 911. The officer responded that sometimes fog can set off the 911 system, the woman said.

“I think he asked to come in,” she said. “He came into my house. I let him in to see there was no emergency.”

The officer then pointed out that the woman had sold him shaving supplies the previous day.

“I said, ‘What a coincidence! You’re here!’” she said. “I didn’t get it.”

Small talk ensued.

“He wouldn’t leave, and he wouldn’t leave,” she said. “It kind of felt weird in my home.”

The officer left after about 20 minutes. A friend later urged her to report the incident.

Last week, Villarreal was indefinately suspended, which is tantamount to being fired. In such cases, an officer’s disciplinary records become public. Brian obtained the SAPD documents, which detailed a disturbing pattern of Villarreal using police equipment to look up personal data and joke about at least seven women:

San Antonio police officer accused of digging up personal data on women while on duty

From today’s story:

The violations involve at least seven women and occurred through October, November and December 2009, according to the city’s findings, which allege the following:

For “personal” reasons, Villarreal researched the criminal history of an apartment manager in his patrol district. In conversations via car terminals, Villarreal and another officer referred to the woman by “nicknames for her breasts.”

Villarreal and another officer also held an “extended” electronic conversation about two other women in which “a comment is passed back and forth about whether (Villarreal) ‘knocked’ or ‘knocked it out,’ referring to sex.”

A few days later, Villarreal ran the registration of a Mercedes-Benz owned by another woman and sent it to a fellow officer. The pair then discussed her “personal physical attributes, her breasts and her attractiveness.”

From the registration information, Villarreal then pulled more of that woman’s personal data, including calls for police service to her home address, her social security number and her municipal court files.

The investigation showed that Villarreal was on duty when he knocked on the door of the woman from the Art of Shaving. He had been dispatched to an assist-the-public call, handled it quickly, then drove to the woman’s house without notifying dispatchers.

At some point Villarreal’s wife learned what the police investigation found — she returned the $400 in shaving supplies.

When I worked on this short article about CPS Energy and its incorrect claim that no one had ever been killed in an accident at a nuclear plant in the United States, I came across this YouTube video about a fatal accident at the SL-1 military facility in Idaho.

That video was obtained by Public.Resource.Org as part of FedFlix, a clever term to describe a vast collection of videos created by federal agencies that Public.Resource.Org is obtaining and posting online, through partnerships with federal agencies and open-government advocates. Copyright claims don’t apply to material produced by the U.S. government, so Public.Resource.Org, led by Carl Malamud, can use the videos however it wants. And it wants to share the treasure trove of material with the public:

FedFlix is a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) in cooperation with other government agencies including the National Archives. They send us government videotapes, we upload them to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and our own public domain stock footage video library— then we send the government back their videotapes and a disk drive with their digitized video.

Here are a few examples of the cool educational and documentary videos available:

True Glory (1945)

An award-winning documentary about World War II, “told by the guys who won it.”

Top 10 Coast Guard rescues

Laser Safety

This psychedelic video by NASA should have won an award for its groovy soundtrack.

Jen wrote an interesting story about a company started in Austin that is trying to sell developers on a novel way to make a profit:

Here’s a new concept in real estate: Buy a house, and when you go to sell it years later, owe the original developer or builder 1 percent of the sales price.

Freehold Capital Partners, a company started in Texas, is selling developers across the country on a plan that would attach a private transfer fee to homes, allowing developers to profit for generations.

Jen, who covers real estate and architecture, said she got a tip about the company’s proposed fee and worked on the story in her spare time for a couple months while also working on stories about the retaining wall collapse at the Hills of Rivermist.

“I thought it was a cool story, but I had all those Rivermist stories going on,” she said.

I like enterprise stories like this that take a long time for a reporter to dig into. It’s a lot of work, but the payoff is a story based on a rich variety of sources that tells readers something new about the world.

Some of the sources Jen relied on for the story included:

The story has already sparked outraged comments from readers, and Freehold has also posted several comments seeking to explain its position. One comment from Freehold says: “The issue is how to pay for infrastructure? Do you prefer that developers put 100% of the burden onto the first time buyer, or lower the initial cost by apportioning the costs over those who live in the development? More importantly, the only seller that will ever pay the fee is a seller who willingly agreed to do so.”

A doctor responded:

This is absolutely a ridiculous. I’m as pro-market and pro-business as just about anyone out there, but this even reeks of bald-faced greed and putrid corruption to me. The sooner these are banned the better. I’m a doctor…with their line of thinking, if I save a life should I be entitled to a percentage of my patients income for the rest of his life? Does Ford deserve a cut when you sell your car? Only the government has the balls to lay claim on people and property like that.

Political junkies, rejoice. C-Span has posted nearly its entire video archive online for the public to search and view. This is awesome.

Lets say you’re researching the roots of the economic crisis, and you want to explore whether the deregulation of the banking industry played a role. The C-Span archive offers the full video of the 1999 bipartisan signing ceremony of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And nearly a decade later, after the housing bubble burst, there’s a video on C-Span of former Sen. Phil Gramm defended his role in the legislation.

A New York Times article about the archives says:

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.

If you think C-Span is boring, did I mention that Chris Farley appeared in Congress in 1995 to impersonate Newt Gingrich? Watch the video in all its glory on C-Span.

In the process of blogging about WOAI’s open-records battle with the Texas Department of Transportation, I had a chance to revisit the Web site set up by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. The foundation has completely revamped its old, sleepy site — check out how it looked as recently as 2008 in the Internet Archive.

The foundation erased that static page and replaced it with social media offerings. The home page is a WordPress blog, and the foundation now has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

The new site makes it easier for people to see the foundation’s good work, and it offers tips for people interested in open government. For example, Executive Director Keith Elkins gives advice on YouTube about how to effectively use the Texas Public Information Act to obtain government records.

Social media still gets a bad rap in some circles, especially in the media. But look at the before and after shots of the foundation’s Web site. It’s not hard to tell which one is more engaging, and which one does a better job explaining to people why open government matters.

WOAI featured a unique, data-driven story last week about the high number of accidents caused by inattentive drivers talking on their cell phones. Journalists at the television station analyzed an accident database kept by the Texas Department of Transportation that tracks contributing factors for all vehicle crashes in Texas.

To get the story, WOAI had to fight a lengthy open-records battle with TxDOT. During their legal dispute, TxDOT took the unusual step of asking a state senator to write a bill that, in its original form, would have kept the entire database private.

The dispute between WOAI and TxDOT is a telling example of how difficult it can be to get important information out to the public. In some cases, it’s a long, expensive slog — it took nearly two years for WOAI to get its hands on the data.
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