Incidents in Washington D.C. where law enforcement officers are reported as the victim have seen a 4x increase since July 2021.
uscrimereview.com/district-of-...
Since January 2016 there have been at least 3,622 incidents reported in DC where law enforcement officers were a victim.
Now that we’re able to explore crime data in this fashion, we can more easily discover interesting trends like:
in West Virginia, reports of prostitution-related offenses seem to occur most often Wednesday to Friday and during the warm months of the year
uscrimereview.com/west-virgini...
I love turning data into something anyone can explore. The more accessible information is, the more informed we all become. Even the smallest flower can blossom quickly.
And in the era of LLMs, the accessibility and openness of data by the public is even more essential.
In July, I was approached for help in getting certain policing statistics in West Virginia.
I was so surprised the FBI's tools to explore crime data lacked critical features making it easy to use for researchers and the public in general ...
... so naturally I made my own. 🙂
US Crime Review (uscrimereview.com) is the largest public crime analytics website, with 183 million+ incidents (& counting!) covering ~86% of the population.
Powered by @duckdb.org, @cloudflare.social, & others, with data from the FBI, the US Census Bureau, OMB, and 17K+ law enforcement agencies.
West Virginia Attorney General, his family, and former campaign manager (currently a registered lobbyist) used State aircraft for a weekend trip to Mackinac Island & Charlevoix Michigan for a political conference.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?search...
Their trip cost thousands in public $'s.
Stay tuned! I’m excited to have more time for projects with more local impact.
DMs are open if you or your organization need someone with 12+ years of experience in software, security, risk management, intelligence, and investigations.
After a long & eventful journey at Salesforce of 6+ years leading product security initiatives, designing secure software, responding to incidents, and researching criminal abuse of products used globally by billions of people … ☕️
I’m ready to embark on a new adventure.
Note: this only includes the 6 aircraft operated by the State Aviation Division (including the WV State Police), and not those operated by the US Government or the WV National Guard.
More info on this here github.com/AustinDizzy/....
🛫 wv-gov-flights.pages.dev
West Virginia state aircraft flew 2 trips, under 4 flight hours, to flood impacted areas in southern WV since February: wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?search....
WV State Police have spent more than double that time on marijuana eradication missions: wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?search....
Even more gross is having the nerve as an elected official, chosen by the public to represent the public's interest, to remove yourself from the definition of a "public body" and from the scope of the public's mechanism for oversight and accountability.
It's unclear what they mean by applying "legislative immunity" to deny public access to records, and nobody seems to have challenged them on it (yet) ... but it's certainly concerning they continue leaning into this idea they are exempt from following accountability laws we expect others to follow.
However I've also noticed since August 2024 the WV Legislature has began citing a new code to deny public access to records (6 times now so far) ...
"W. Va. Code §4-1A-1 et. seq." ... "Legislative Immunity".
code.wvlegislature.gov/4-1A/
In those 422 WVFOIA requests, the WV Legislature has cited §29B-1-4(a)(8) (the "internal memorandums" exemption) 86 times.
The WV House alone has used the "internal memorandums exemption" in 34% of their responses, mostly in requests for emails & bill research materials.
The WV Legislature (House & Senate + legislative commissions) have received 422 WVFOIA requests to date since Jan 2016.
For comparison, in the same time frame the WV Governor's Office received 556, Marshall University received 1,114, and @westvirginiau.bsky.social (non-medical) received 2,743.
It's simply unreasonable for the legislature to create a new section in the WVFOIA to exempt themselves with their own rules.
This is very "rules for thee but not for me" vibes, especially considering the WVFOIA already has 100+ reasonable exemptions to which they've been using.
Check out the quote thread for some quick insights from the data.
Since devastating floods hit southern WV, the State’s aviation fleet has barely moved.
The State plane has taken one trip to DC and one to Martinsburg.
None of the five helicopters—including the two WV State Police helicopters—have been used.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?startD...
This is not just coming from an outsider ... per a report by the WV Legislature's auditing unit released just two weeks ago, revenues from flights tend to make up less than 20% of the unit's expenditures.
They are literally just burning money in the air.
www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/re...
Another example of waste? 446 trips (at least), over 2,100 flight hours, and significantly over $1.2 million spent on "Marijuana Eradication" flights.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?search...
So are all State aircraft uses wasteful? We've been through this before ... No, sometimes it does make sense economically to operate these flights ...
except times like this wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips/N1WV/2...
Justice called up the plane, they got there, and he decided to drive instead ...
WV Dept of Commerce twice allowed a Chinese national—former WVU professor & Asst to the Governor on China Affairs, later federally charged w/ fraud—to travel around mining sites in the state on the helicopter with associates.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/passengers/q...
www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr...
The Governor isn't the only one using State aircraft ... the State Aviation Division's mission says they provide service for "State executives".
That includes administrators of WV's PEIA, who spent nearly $30,000 on in-state flights from 2017 to 2022.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?divisi...
Yes, Jim Justice indeed only flew once in the State helicopter (N3WV) ... and over 130 times in the State airplane (N1WV).
During his tenure as Governor, his ass was on State aircraft for a total of 9 days 14 hours.
x.com/AustinDizzy/...
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/passengers/g...
While serving as Governor, Jim Justice’s flights to Washington, DC on State aircraft increased ~11.5x after his election to the U.S. Senate.
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev/trips?depart...
Without the ability to easily search and visualize these records, the public is completely in the dark.
Now that we have it ... let's start to shine some light on how State of West Virginia aircraft has been used over the years. 🧵
View the source code, report bugs, sponsor, or contribute on GitHub.
All the above released in the public domain via CC0. Records were obtained via FOIA; flight paths sourced from public ADS-B data.
github.com/AustinDizzy/...
The State of West Virginia operates a fleet of aircraft for use by State executives—but who’s flying, where, and why?
Now you can track over 5,000 flights (and counting!) on the State of WV aviation fleet with this public database:
wv-gov-flights.pages.dev
In addition to the pretty site linked in the parent tweet, the database is also available as a datasette so you can run advanced SQL queries on the raw data and download records in a number of formats (JSON, CSV, RSS, SQLite(3)).
🔗 l.abs.codes/data/wvu-dat...
Learn more about the data schema, read the source code, and report bugs or submit contributions over on GitHub: github.com/AustinDizzy/....
All the above released in the public domain via CC0. All records were retrieved via #FOIA.