This is an R package to help data analysts, data journalists, and anyone else import and clean Metropolitan Police Department's (the police department for the Washington D.C. metropolitan area) stop data.
Metropolitan PD only released their data after a number of lawsuits filed by ACLU-DC, Black Lives Matter DC, and Stop Police Terror Project D.C.. Read local coverage of those lawsuits here. The data are available on MPD's website here.
Coincidentally, Metropolitan PD's data releases are highly, highly messy. This package helps users import the data they want and clean it.
You can install the development version of metropdcleanR from GitHub with:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ldimartin0/metropdcleanR")
Accessing MPD data, which is stored in arbitrarily-separated CSV files on their website, is a fairly difficult task on its own. metropdcleanR::get_yr_data() allows you to access that data with one line:
d <- get_yr_data(2020)
You can access multiple years of data as well:
d <- get_yr_data(2019:2021)
On its own, metropdcleanR::get_yr_data() only loads the data into working memory. That data can then be exported into a file type of your choice manually. On the other hand, if you want to use the built-in tool, change the export parameter to TRUE:
get_yr_data(2019:2021)
Once imported, MPD's stop data is highly messy. metropdcleanR provides a function to clean MPD data, metropdcleanR::clean_data(). Call it on any raw MPD file for cleaning:
d <- get_yr_data(2020)
d <- clean_data(d)
metropdcleanR::clean_data() does not change any meaningful values about the data, it only prepares the data for analysis.
Maintenance information is all in the description file.