![]() ![]() “We’re looking at the language officers use because we know that language is powerful thus, getting it right matters given unavoidable consequences for interpersonal encounters and relationships. “We’re using an innovative strategy which focuses on language produced between dispatchers and police officers, and police officers with each other,” Spencer said. Using a public archive of more than 45,000 hours of recordings from Chicago police radio bands, the team will build a data processing pipeline that transcribes audio and reconstructs specific events - from routine arrests to officer-involved shootings - in order to better understand the institutional, individual, and contextual factors that influence policing incidents. Those challenges led to a collaboration with language processing expert Karen Livescu, Associate Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and a CDAC-funded seed project in the Winter 2019 round of funding. Yet in order to open that window, technical advances are first needed to accurately convert noisy, low quality audio recordings into text and other features for research and analysis. Margaret Beale Spencer, the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Life Course Development at the University of Chicago, believes that this language could provide a window into the broader relationship between police officers and minority youth. But subjectivity, emotions, and other complicating factors can creep into these conversations between officers and dispatchers, perhaps influencing how high-pressure incidents are handled. The language used by police officers on their radios is highly structured, meant to convey information as accurately and efficiently as possible. But one rich source of data remains unmined: police radio communications. ![]() In recent years, a host of data-driven efforts have attempted to improve policing, decrease crime, and prevent incidents between officers and the public. ![]()
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