Inspiration
Post-pandemic, the public has been aware of much more police brutality cases which poses questions about our trust in law enforcement. As people of color, we wanted to create a resource where people are able to find past incidents of brutality in order to bring awareness about the overall safety of the neighborhood. In doing so, families are able to gauge if they are truly safe and in a community that accepts them. We wanted this to bring awareness to the public in order to incite a change in public policy aimed at reforming the legal system. It saddens us to hear about all these cases and the unfair treatment. We want to help people avoid such areas.
What it does
Our website provides general information about police brutality and provides staggering statistics about general trends of hostile police activity towards all people. We also included a search engine that allows users to look up different locations and find, if any, case where reported police brutality occurred. It provides essential information about the victim, date, and also provides multiple links that cover their story. We want those people to be heard in hopes of inciting change.
How we built it
We used a python library called Flask for the backend and simple HTML and CSS for the frontend.
Challenges we ran into
We had some trouble with styling and formatting our data. As beginner programmers, we believe that practicing our CSS skills will help us avoid this challenge. In addition, we were not sure on how to host our website, so we could not deploy it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to be able to develop a working website that allows users to gather the necessary information they need. Although there could be room for many improvements, we did a great job. This is one of many steps in order to prevent and hopefully stop the issue of police brutality. Many of the publicized cases are about people of color which we can relate to. It gives us a sense of achievement and fulfillment that we are able to provide a resource to keep our people safe. This project was a success, and we hope to continue to update this project to keep up accurate and relevant data.
What we learned
Since we only had fundamental programming skills in Python, we learned how to use Flask as well as HTML and CSS to complete our project.
What's next for Transparency Now
The next step for Transparency now is to make the UI more aesthetic and include more information. In addition, we want to implement live updates to our database of police reports. In doing so, it will allow people to accurately know what the current situation is. We also want to update our site to provide resources and pending and proposed laws aimed to help aid this issue.
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