Talk given by Jessica Phoenix at 5th Data Conversations, Lancaster University

1. DATA CONVERSATIONS: STORIES
FROM THE FIELD
Working with police recorded data
Jessica Phoenix
@_JessicaPhoenix

2. BACKGROUND
Undertaking PhD research in collaboration with the local
police force, measuring and investigating domestic violent
crime
Recently completed a project with the force on missing
person cases, which is the focus of this presentation
Data were extracted directly from police force information
systems and variables chosen alongside the police analyst

3. PROCESSING THE DATA:
ANONYMITY
First issue: thousands of cases all including names,
addresses, personal circumstances and information of the
person’s missing report
Raw data could not be used outside of police force devices
or seen by non-police personnel
To delete all personal information would prohibit the
tracking of repeat missing persons, and so a code needed
to be applied to anonymise persons without losing details of
repeats

5. PROCESSING THE DATA:
FORMATTING
Massively underestimated how long this would take!
Dataset contained all missing person reports made to the
police force in 2015, the starting number was 5952
All missing data were removed, with less time constraints
on the project a method of imputation would have been
preferred
Removing all duplicated entries, typos and errors left 4746
usable cases

6. BENEFITS OF
COLLABORATING
Access to the data!
Having both researcher
and practitioner
perspectives influence
and interpret the project
Results being fed
directly into the
organisation

7. CHALLENGES
Trying to combine police and university schedules to
organise meetings is difficult and can delay the research
progress
Underestimating how long it would take to clean and format
the data and having less time for analysis
Caution over drawing implications from police recorded
crime

8. QUESTIONS
J.PHOENIX@LANCASTER.AC.UK