Philadelphia Bail Fund Interactive Data Portal

Philadelphia Bail Fund (PBF) is a revolving fund that posts bail for people who are indigent and cannot afford bail. Our goal is to keep families and communities together and vigorously advocate for the end to cash bail in Philadelphia.

This project aims to provide up to date reports and visualizations on bail, and to track over time its adverse impacts on different populations (e.g. its impact on poorer areas, based on race, or those in jails during the covid 19 pandemic). These reports can educate the public and hold decision makers accountable.

They currently obtain information from a number of data sources:

• Bail data - accessible records scraped from the court’s new criminal filings portal.
• Local jail data - from phila.gov.
• Full dockets - challenging to parse, but comprehensive, bail records in the UJS portal.

This data allows them to take strategic action, and provide education. For example, they use the bail data to produce weekly bail reports. This project would offer support for scraping, archiving the data, and building on these critical reports.

Goals

• Archive data and create reports from the bail data and local jail data.

• Host reports on central site (see their weekly bail reports or the district attorney’s portal)

• Create reports based on the harder to parse, full court dockets (e.g. parse information on magistrate).

Roles Needed

• Data scientists / analysts to help create narratives around bail data.
• Software engineers to help archive data and parse the full court dockets.
• Web developers to help with hosting reports on a central portal. Don't fit the above? Join the slack channel, so we can find something in the project for you!