National Police Funding Database

About the National Police Funding Database

The National Police Funding Database is a project of the Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) which is the research and advocacy hub of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the premier legal organization fighting for racial justice in the United States. TMI launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative.

The database provides publicly available data on federal grants and military equipment transfers to more than 250 local law enforcement agencies across the US along with demographic and police department data for those jurisdictions.

The problem at hand

Many police departments across the United States receive federal funding in the form of grants and military equipment transfers. Crucially, in doing so they must comply with civil rights laws. 

When citizens are knowledgeable about the federal funding their police departments receive, they can engage with their community and advocate for transparency and accountability in policing. 

TMI first launched the National Police Funding Database in 2019, providing federal grant funding information for a select number of cities and counties. Over time, TMI sought to expand the number of locations represented in the database as well as incorporate information about military equipment received by local law enforcement agencies. 

When TMI approached Durable Digital about enhancing the site, we identified several additional opportunities to improve the user experience and significantly reduce the effort required to manage the website—the initial version of the site was not directly editable by TMI. As we continued to collaborate with TMI, it became clear that rebuilding the site was the best path forward.

Creating a streamlined content management experience

The primary development challenge we faced was how to bring together multiple sources of data into a single, consistent format that can be queried in real-time to avoid performance issues from multiple external API calls. 

Our solution was to create an external data access layer within the application to query each of the four APIs for the required data and store it in the local Umbraco database using NPOCO in a custom table. To ensure data is kept up to date, we set up scheduled tasks using the Recurring Hosted Service Base class which periodically refreshes external data and translates it into the required format. Once the data is imported into the local Umbraco instance, we assign an approval status to each record with the default status being “Unapproved”—meaning it will not display on the front end.

 

 

A custom dashboard highlights recently imported data that requires action, filtered by location. Clicking a location opens the content app for that city or county, where newly detected data can be approved for display or rejected and prevented from re-importing. All actions are audited using the Umbraco log and changes can be undone at any time. 

To allow backoffice users to quickly and intuitively associate data sets with content items, we created 15 custom property editors. These autocomplete search fields also help reduce errors, as they are context-aware. To further streamline the content management experience, we created a way to centrally manage dynamic pages. Tokens are used to present variable data, such as the name of a city or when a piece of data was updated.

 

 

The amazing results ⭐

The expanded database is now a powerful tool for researchers, activists, and others seeking to promote equity and accountability. Early evidence suggests greatly increased engagement with the site. In the first month after re-launch (compared to the same period the previous year) these were the results:

- The bounce rate dropped by 26%

- Average session duration increased by 96%

- Pages per session increased by 87%