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Minneapolis police report stops and other incidents by neighborhood, so I decided to calculate the racial makeup of those neighborhoods to make some comparisons — along the lines of what I've already done for New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

This time, though, I'm using Datasette.

I've seen creator Simon Willison tweet about Datasette, and with some extra time on my hands I took a look. It's so impressive!

With Datasette, one can publish data online easily, efficiently (even free!) and in a way that allows others to explore the data themselves using SQL and feed data visualizations and apps. At scale.

How is this not in every newsroom?

(Simon, by the way, has offered to help any newsroom interested in using Datasette — an offer I hope to take him up on someday.)

Minneapolis neighborhoods

Once again, I've married US Census blocks with other municipal zones, this time the official neighborhood map of Minneapolis.

That data is now online, served up with Datasette.

And with some nifty SQL queries, bookmarked as simple links, I can list the race and ethnic makeup of every neighborhood by raw number.

Or by percentage.

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If you've got arrest or incident data from the Metropolitan Police in Washington DC, and that data is broken out by police district or public service area, you may want to compare it with the racial and ethnic makeup of the people living in those zones.

If so, this post is for you.

The US Census doesn't break out populations by police districts. But in DC and other large cities, census blocks serve as atomic units that usually do fall within police precinct boundaries. So by knowing which blocks are within which districts, you can calculate the populations. Unfortunately, block-level data is only available from the decennial count, so the latest data is from 2010.

This is my third spin at such data — I've also done New York City and Chicago. 

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