POLICINGHackathon Focuses on Making Policing More Equitable
A hackathon, just to be clear, has nothing to do with tunneling into computer servers and trying to swipe bank accounts or social security numbers. It’s a timed race to develop something new—a mobile app or computer game, a business idea, a fresh way of thinking about public policy.
Dalton Favors had never given much thought to public policy. One hectic week of data wrangling with the Pardee RAND Graduate School changed that. “It made me rethink what I might want to do for a career,” he said.
Favors is a student at Morehouse College, one of four historically Black colleges and universities that have partnered with Pardee RAND and RAND’s NextGen Initiative to host a “policy hackathon” for two years running. Its purpose is to bring new ideas and new perspectives to hard policy problems—and to introduce a new generation of potential leaders to the field of policy analysis.
The most recent hackathon, held this past fall, focused on policing. Small teams of undergraduate students, working with Pardee RAND graduate students, had one week to identify areas for improvement that could make policing more equitable. Lesson one: Find the story in the numbers.
“I hadn’t understood how powerful data can be, that good data is really a reflection of the life that we live,” said Favors, who is pursuing a double major in Chinese and economics at Morehouse. “It really revolutionized how I think about how public policy can work—or should work.”
A hackathon, just to be clear, has nothing to do with tunneling into computer servers and trying to swipe bank accounts or social security numbers. It’s a timed race to develop something new—a mobile app or computer game, a business idea, a fresh way of thinking about public policy. “It’s pizza and Mountain Dew and a bunch of people in a room trying to build something,” says veteran hackathoner Todd Richmond.
Richmond directs Pardee RAND’s Tech + Narrative Lab, which launched several years ago as a place where the questions students ask are often more important than the answers. Hackathons have been part of its operating code from the beginning. Richmond and his team have used hackathons to prototype new methods for flagging toxic comments on social media and for studying marketplace transactions on the dark web.
