The California Department of Justice and Attorney General Kamala Harris are seeking consultant services to help redesign the OpenJustice website and extend transparency features within its data dashboard.
In February the California Attorney General's Office unveiled the second version of the open data portal, dubbed "OpenJustice v. 1.1." Additions to the website's dashboard include crime, clearance and arrest rates at the city, county and state level. Available data also include arrest-related deaths, deaths in custody, and law enforcement officers killed or assaulted, as well as demographic data and other societal information.
OpenJustice originally was launched in September 2015 as part of what Attorney General Kamala Harris said is "a whole new way of doing business in government, which is adopting technology in a way that improves transparency."
With the release April 20 of a new RFQ, a second iteration of the data portal seems in the making. RFQ submissions are due May 3.
"This is a deliverables-based contract to obtain services to redesign the DOJ OpenJustice website, dashboard and data portal. The goal is to further increase transparency by building additional features and functionality to the current OpenJustice Portal and Dashboard that includes a broad array of data sets and visualizations of metrics from across the justice system.The Vendor’s resource(s) will work with DOJ staff blending the consultants with the DOJ resources to maximize knowledge transfer and jointly develop working solutions," the RFQ says.
OpenJustice could be bolstered by legislation pertaining to data collected from local law enforcement agencies.
AB 2524, introduced Feb. 19 by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, D-Thousand Oaks, would require CalDOJ to continue preparing an annual data set "that contains the number of crimes reported, number of clearances and clearance rates in California as reported by individual law enforcement agencies," and either post it via a hyperlink on the department's website or post it on the department's OpenJustice data portal. The bill was put in the suspense file on April.
