Data Science, Police Accountability, and Community Engagement Research Lab
The Data Science, Police Accountability, and Community Engagement (DSPACE) Research Lab partners with communities to work towards data-informed police accountability. Our group originated as the Small Town Policing Accountability (SToPA) Lab within the Institute for Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE Institute). The SToPA Lab was developed in 2021 by a group of data scientists, social justice activists, and statisticians in response to discriminatory practices within the Williamstown, MA police department [1]. In Spring 2024, members of the SToPA Lab formed this new DSPACE Research Lab focused on communities of all sizes and as the research-intensive branch in the realm of police accountability. Our team of mathematicians, statisticians, and data scientists collaborates with community members and organizations to answer challenging questions about patterns in policing. Our endeavor is to make a direct and meaningful impact with the public and to contribute to scholarly research at the intersection of data science/statistics and policing.
The DSPACE Research Lab is supported by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study as a Research and Creative Collaborative.
Lab Contributors
Claire Kelling
Assistant Professor of Statistics, Carleton College
Ariana Mendible
Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Data Science, Seattle University
Alex Wiedemann
Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computational Data Science, Hamline University
Tim Marrinan
Data Scientist,
PhD Mathematics
Reinvestigation Workgroup
A Minnesota-based investigation team that reinvestigates police killings
Will Asinger
PhD Student, Biostatistics and Health Data Science, University of Minnesota
Jesse Loi
Student Researcher, MS Data Science, Seattle University
Maren Rusk
Student Researcher, Statistics and Politics, Pomona College
Mia (Cong) Wang
Student Researcher, BS Mathematics & Statistics '25, Carleton College
Recent Developments
DSPACE wrapped up our in-person meeting by planning out our next few months of work, including further analysis of Minneapolis PD data.
DSPACE members presented a series of public safety-related data visualizations to community members at Transmission in South Minneapolis. We discussed how data visualization and analysis can be used to advance community priorities in the domain of public safety.
DSPACE members met with the Reinvestigation Work Group (RWG) at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) to discuss our collaboration. We shared about our analysis of complaint networks, RWG shared about their current projects, and we discussed how to ensure that our future work is motivated by RWG’s priorities.
Jesse presented a poster at Minneapolis’ SciPy conference detailing the Datathon DSPACE hosted across Carleton College, Hamline University, and Seattle University. The poster also details the use of large language models to extract location information from news articles on police misconduct.
DSPACE members Will Asinger and Mia Wang presented a poster at the American Statistical Association’s Midwest Regional Conference on Statistics and Data Science based on our work comparing complaint networks from four cities. We were awarded Best Graduate Student Poster.