Introduction
This is a small tool created with Jupyter Notebook that takes in data from a few publicly available sources of active warrants (in Scott County and Pottawattamie County) and compares those with a database of currently incarcerated people in Nebraska.
Data Sources
- Nebraska Department of Corrections Inmate Search: https://dcs-inmatesearch.ne.gov/Corrections/COR_input.html
- Palo Alto County Warrants: https://paloaltosheriff.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/12/Warrants12.04.pdf
- Scott County Warrants: https://www.scottcountyiowa.us/sheriff/warrants.php
- Pottawattamie County Warrants: https://sheriff.pottcounty-ia.gov/public-awareness/warrants.php
There were a few other counties that provided freely available warrant data, but have yet to be incorporated into this proof of concept:
- Black Hawk County Warrants: https://www.bhcso.org/WarrantSearch.aspx
- Woodbury: http://warrants.wcicc.com/
- Sioux County: https://siouxcountysheriff.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/sheriffdocs/jailwarrants.pdf
- Fayette County: http://www.fayettecountysheriff.com/warrant_list.htm
- Dickinson County: https://dickinsoncountysheriff.com/files/summary/3-jail/12-warrants
- O’Brien County: https://www.obriencountysheriff.com/cruploads/AR_WarrantList.pdf
- Ida County: https://www.idacountysheriff.us/warrants
- Osceola County: https://www.sheriffosceolacounty.org/_files/ugd/5a6361_2d88097cb3654c728a3679579b954b1b.pdf
Warrant Databases
I think that there must be a standard software package used to generate these warrant sheets because I noticed that several had the same layout. Unfortunately they often provided this data in PDF format, so because I didn’t want to work with an OCR tool I decided to stick only with data that could be easily transformed into XLSX or CSV.
In the future if working more closely with law enforcement it would be ideal to receive this data in HTML, XLSX or CSV.
Methodology
This is a simple data cleaning operation. From the Nebraska dataset, anyone with a life sentence was removed because they won’t be getting out and anyone with an earliest projected release date in the past was also removed.
Then, the warrant data was loaded in and columns renamed so that they could be joined on. The age was calculated using a function in counties where only the Date of Birth was provided.
Regular Expressions (regex) were used to parse out the name into a standard First, Middle , Last columns since some counties provided them in the more typical Last, First, Middle.
Then an inner join was done to identify any matches. The join was made on the first and last name, and the age, and so is tentative at best.
Results
There are 7,451 active inmates in the Nebraska prison system. (Someone can be Active and released, because they’re still on parole or under some other kind of supervision.)
In Pottawattamie County there are 1,513 active warrants. In Scott County there are 813 and in Palo Alto County there are 225. This makes for a total of 2,551 warrants. (For comparison, the population of the 3 counties equals 275,152 in 2019.)
No results were returned for Palo Alto and Scott County but 16 results were returned in Pottawattamie County. Pottawattamie County is right on the border with Nebraska so this makes sense – individuals moving slightly across the border and then getting caught for crime in their new state.
Limitations and Discussion
This project is very manualized currently. Each dataset had to be cleaned prior to loading which makes it hard to scale. Ways to extend this project will include:
- Automating the downloading of the various datasets using the requests and beautifulsoup library rather than downloading them by hand.
- Increasing the number of state databases that are checked. For example the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Illinois, and Minnesota all border Iowa and could also have inmates with active warrants here.
- Increasing the number of county databases that are checked. The counties appear to use a standardized system, so if a state-wide initiative were developed this could increase its efficiency.
View the Code
The code is on Github in a private repository but may be released in the future.
