Examining Data Practices: Cyberabad's Publicly Accessible Crime Map

Examining data practices: The
Cyberabad metropolitan police’s
publicly accessible crime map
Hyderabad Urban Lab

March 2nd 2013

Hyderabad Urban Lab

✤ HUL is a multidisciplinary urban research initiative that is inspired
by the idea of the ‘right to the city’.

✤ It aims to build an academically rigorous urban research program
that is responsive to the needs of new and emergent communities of
practice in cities in the Global South.

✤ We believe that at this time of rapid and dramatic changes in urban
structures, we need to be innovative and willing to transgress
conventional disciplinary boundaries and academic protocols in the
pursuit of ecological sustainability and social justice.

Hyderabad Urban Lab

✤ We are in the process of building an online platform for research, data
sharing and data generation customized for the city of Hyderabad

✤ Two of our prime focus areas are water and waste.

Hyderabad Urban Lab

✤ We have also been making forays into another area, which is the
examination of the role of data in the creation of safer and more
inclusive cities - spurred by recent debates in Hyderabad around the
issue of violence against women.

Hyderabad Urban Lab
✤ Ravinder Kaur put her finger on something very important in her
analysis of the discussions that were happening in the media and
other spaces after the violence in Delhi (The Hindu, January 4th, 2013)

✤ There were strange and interesting mis-recognitions

Midnight March-January 5th 2013

Midnight March- tank bund as a
symbolic space
✤ Important public space tied to Hyderabad’s identity

✤ 400 year old lake- cultivation in the foreshore

✤ 1940s a promenade was built- becoming a space of leisure

✤ Tank bund- early 1980s TDP- creating a symbolic space- built 32
statues (Andhra Coastal Communities, resembled NTR)

✤ In the 90s the foreshore was converted into a road- Necklace road

✤ During this period a number of parks were created

protest space
✤ The area around Hussain Sagar has been part of multiple strategies to
turn it into a symbolic space- spectacular spaces are important to
world city making.

✤ In important space of protest and resistance- drive to sanitize this
space- highly regulated

✤ State Secretariat main gate was changed too face lumbini park.

✤ Barring a few examples(farmer protests in 2000, million march 2011)
in recent years has seen mainly domesticated protests- candle light
vigils etc.

✤ Many more ‘unruly’ kinds of protests have been restricted to Dharna
Chowk south of tank bund

space of consumption

✤ Hussain Sagar, being an important part of the city’s identity, is a
crucial space that state actors have tried to re-imagine in their quest to
become a world class city.

✤ A lot of effort has gone into casting it as a public space of leisure and
world class consumption, while simultaneously attempting to
sanitize it from being used as a space of protest.

✤ In the 90s and early 2000s - lumbini park, eat street, peoples plaza,
IMAX theatre, NTR park, Sanjeeva park spruced up.

space of consumption

space of work
✤ Tank bund is also a space of work for two groups of women- street
sweepers and sex workers

✤ Two groups that receive a lot of violence- workers rights- space of
illegality

✤ There were efforts to engage these two groups. However there was no
participation - tank bund being imagined as a space of consumption vs a
space of work.

✤ The timing of the march, which was late at night did not allow for the
participation of these two groups.

✤ In fact, the march, which occurred right in the middle of their workspace
disrupted their work - the sweepers were asked to wait until the march
was over while the sex workers were moved east of tank bund, right next
to the municipal office.

space of work

Safer cities- the role of data

✤ One action plan from events organized post the march was to create a
crowdsourced mapping platform that logs reports of sexual
harassment and sexual assault in India- known as SafeCity (and
inspired by the SafeCity initiative in the Netherlands).

✤ It operates on the very important idea that unlike violent crimes, acts
such as groping in public spaces and the like are difficult to report to
the authorities, are not collected by them, and that this is vital data to
capture.


✤ SafeCity is an intervention that comes from a particular set of notions
on the role of data in making cities more safe and inclusive,
something that perhaps we all ascribe to, and that wraps in itself a
whole set of set of beliefs on how individuals and citizen groups play
an important part in using data to creating impact.

✤ This is perhaps why it is not surprising that the SafeCity platform is
not the first of it’s kind that has been build to tackle this issue. We are
aware of the efforts of at least two other NGOs, Prajnya in Chennai,
and Jagori in Delhi that have used and championed similar platforms.


✤ Especially with conversations on open data, there is a tendency to
believe that data pre-exists - the job is to go out there and get it.

✤ However data is an artifact. It is a product of political and social
processes - that ultimately influence the data practices of every
institution responsible for creating these datasets.

✤ This process is usually ‘black boxed’.

✤ What can we say about open data when these processes are
unpacked??- this is an open question.

The Cyberabad metropolitan police’s

✤ In the midst of all of these debates, we got wind of a data platform
that visualized crime data for the Cyberabad area - developed by a
private consultant for the Cyberabad metropolitan
police(http://tecdatum.in/crimemap.aspx).

✤ We scraped the data from the site, and the analysis of this data gave
us multiple insights into their data practices; from the process of data
digitization, to the way in which gender offenses are categorized and
recorded by the police stations.

✤ All of this provided us with a window to really understand how the
government ‘sees’ crime related to gender.

publicly accessible crime map- Issues

✤ There were four main issues that immediately jumped out when we
took a closer look at the data- issues connected to erroneous data, the
way the data was categorized, issues related to the data
collection/visualization process, and finally the issue of privacy.


✤ With regards to the erroneous data we felt that the way the data was
spatialized was particularly problematic, with evidence to suggest
that the long/lat values were given somewhat in an adhoc manner.


✤ Pressure to visualize the data a certain kind of way? Akin to other
crime mapping efforts by other countries, but something that does
not reflect the way data is collected or understood downstream?


✤ The way the data is categorized- shows how valuable an initiative
like SafeCity can be...


✤ The basis of categorization comes from the Indian penal code. They
reflect legal categories, that is, the categorization connects to various
laws that exist so that the FIR can translate into a charge sheet.


✤ A window into how the police person understands the complaint and
translates it into an FIR.

✤ Hints at the fact that the way the data is collected and visualized
allows for very little accountability- no way of tracking cases, hard to
find out who is responsible for writing a particularly poor FIR or
responsible for a improperly categorizing a case.

Moving Forward- discussion

✤ What can we say about open data when these processes are
unpacked? - data practices are highly contextual - there is a need to
interrogate these processes.

✤ How do we think through the potential of data / data collection
strategies in the context of the example of street sweepers and sex
workers in the Hyderabad context? what does it take for an initiative
like SafeCity to connect to these groups?

✤ How does one affect not only the way in which government makes
it’s data available, but also how and what data is collected and
visualized?

Examining Data Practices: Cyberabad's Publicly Accessible Crime Map

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