Submitted by Maggi Kelly on
The Kellylab is requesting support for 2 SPUR undergraduate students to map the proportion of municipal budgets that fund police departments in municipalities across California. The proportion of municipal general funds dedicated to police departments varies widely across the state (some reported values range from ~10% to nearly half), and this project will: 1) gather information from websites of several major cities or municipalities in California; 2) visualize results on a map of California; and 3) create a Story Map presentation showcasing the work.
This project comes out of our ongoing partnership with Mapping Black California (MBC), a collaborative GIS project that incorporates technology, data, geography, and place-based study to better understand and connect African American communities in California. If time allows, MBC has a number of other potential mapping projects the undergraduate student may contribute to, such as spatial disparities in the health and economic impacts of COVID-19 on African American communities in the US.
The work will also leverage a partnership with Streetwyze, a Bay Area mapping startup dedicated to supporting community driven transformation, and GreenInfo Network (GIN), a non-profit company dedicated to mapping in the public interest. Each of these groups is dedicated to local empowerment, mapping technology, and environmental and social justice; Streetwyze and GIN are also developing internship programs for BIPOC students interested in mapping technology. In addition to the work described above, we will also host an end-of-semester conference in collaboration with the groups above and their student interns to facilitate networking and share their work.
The SPUR students will be responsible for finding data via the web and entering data into a spreadsheet. The students will then geo-code and map the data, creating a rich visualization of regional differences in police funding. The project will be incorporated into a Story Map for web-based project distribution.
The SPUR students will attend weekly meetings with the Kellylab (Kelly, Wilkinson, Kislik, and Taylor) to mentor and provide project guidance.
The SPUR students should have a good understanding of GIS and mapping. The student should have had an introductory GIS course, and some GIS project experience. Ability to use ArcGIS Pro is a plus.