The Allegheny County Policing Project (ACPP) began in the summer of 2020, amidst the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns and motivated by the Black Lives Matter movement. Hosted by the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation (CAASI), a group of students, community members, and activists came together to share their experiences and discuss ways to increase police accountability locally. ACPP emerged as a direct result of those conversations.

Police accountability can be linked to police contracts or collective bargaining agreements, which are employment contracts detailing the rights and responsibilities of police officers. In Allegheny County, there are over 100 different police departments serving their respective municipalities, each with their own contract. Accessing the specifics of these contracts empowers both researchers and residents to scrutinize the current language and whether it serves the community appropriately. However, the hyper-fragmented nature of policing in Allegheny County can be overwhelming and confusing for residents to navigate.

ACPP volunteers collected the police contracts of Allegheny County and published them on the ACPP website as a searchable database with keywords that relate these local contracts to the six areas of police accountability identified by the national organization Campaign Zero. In addition, the tool provides an interactive map to display statistics related to Allegheny County’s police departments and a guide for navigating the complexity of filing misconduct complaints in Allegheny County. The entire project, from conceptualization, data collection, UX design, to programming was executed entirely by students and community volunteers.

ACPP’s ongoing engagement with community partners has revealed that the issue of policing is deeply connected to incarceration and human rights. To this end, our participation in local change making is very important and service learning can provide a powerful mechanism for expanding our knowledge of issues in policing. The best way to learn and stay up to date on these issues is to advance the efforts of our community partners by attending events, meetings, and symposiums. This is also a great opportunity to understand the inner workings of local law, courts, and the criminal justice system, which all aim to protect human rights. We are looking for students to :
attend meetings of the Allegheny County Citizen Review Board, the Allegheny County Jail Oversight Board, Human Rights Legislation Task Force, and other community meetings that may come up
track current events, papers and reports on the topic from city council, activists, Public Source, and social media
map the ecosystem of activism, summarize the current state of events, and connect it to research literature
gather data on the police citizen complaint process from Allegheny County municipalities, turn unstructured data into structured data as the data is currently poorly documented
connect the data within ACPP website to these issues and in the process, identify improvements for the website that will make it more useful for residents
interact with faculty in GSPIA, Law, and Social Work that specialize in related fields

Students will be part of the research hub through GSPIA Undergraduate Fellowship and Frederick Honors College Research Hub.