I had always thought that the most difficult part of any computer-assisted reporting project would be negotiating for the data.
But in my first real attempt at a CAR story, I found the opposite to be true. I got the data - a catalog of complaints about alleged building and health code violations at properties in the city of Lowell - after a fight, but not an intolerable one. The most difficult part of my project was figuring out what to do with the data.
My initial story idea turned out to be undoable with my time and budget constraints, forcing me to explore other avenues with the data. What began as an attempt to examine the effectiveness of Lowell's property inspection system ended up as a profile of an outspoken and flashy Nigerian prince who was one of the largest owners of run-down properties in the city.
The project started in late summer, after several gang-related shootings in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Politicians in Lowell, a former textile manufacturing boomtown, called for a police crackdown on the gangs. City administrators began focusing on the absentee landlords whose properties police said served as hangouts for the gangs.
With the new emphasis on enforcing state building and health codes, we wanted to quantify what had been done prior to the high-profile crackdown. We especially were interested in determining the frequency of property inspections and the city's overall success rate for abating problem properties. I had attended a NICAR Boot Camp a few months earlier and thought this project presented a good opportunity for me to incorporate what I had learned.
As I reported, I discovered that city building inspectors kept a Microsoft Access database of their activities dating back to 1998. I asked for it, making what seemed to be the first request for electronic records that the city of Lowell ever had. My interest in the data initially triggered consternation from city officials. The building commissioner accused me of targeting him for unfair scrutiny and said I would have to pay 50 cents a record for each of the 12,000 records in the database. City legal staff asked me to place stricter limits on my request. At the time, I wasn't exactly sure what the data would show, but I hoped that it would at least shed light on the effectiveness of building department inspections. Unfortunately, that did not turn out to be the case.
The database contained complaints about problem properties called into the building department and a description of the response to them, but I was told it was not comprehensive. I was beginning to get a bit discouraged. I soon learned that building inspectors enforce only state building codes, which encompass construction guidelines and minimum structural soundness rules. They become involved with properties when there are problems such as a lack of exits from an apartment or a balcony railing is unsafe. Cockroach and rodent infestations, broken plumbing, leaking sewage, heat and electricity shutoffs - almost any problem in the interior of an apartment - are health code violations. These account for the bulk of citations generated by the city and are handled by Lowell's Health Department.
Health and building inspectors kept records separately on paper, under a property's address, and neither did it very well. The state housing court for my region lists all the Lowell property citations that are heard by a judge, but court records only are available on paper at 50 cents a page and offer no insight on how many complaints city inspectors actually resolve. Reporting a story on the total number of inspections conducted in Lowell and their outcome would have required me to sift through large numbers of files and far exceeded the time I had available for the project and possibly my newspaper's budget.
I discovered many of these shortcomings about the same time I negotiated my public records request with the city legal staff. From the outset, the legal staff repeatedly asked me to explain specifically what I was looking for and to limit my request to just that. My insistence upon receiving all of the data really flustered the city attorney I dealt with. She was unfamiliar with the concept of a database and seemed very nervous about giving me something that could reflect badly upon her later. At one point, she said she would need months to review every bit of information in the database before she could release it to me. But we finally scheduled a formal meeting.
She brought along the city's chief information officer, who reinforced her demand that I explain exactly what I wanted by unleashing a stream of techno-jargon at me about how difficult it could be to fulfill my request. This was all very frustrating. It was now nearly two months after I had asked for the data and no one whom I was dealing with had even looked at it. Had I been unaware that the database was relatively simple and small, the protests would have sounded completely valid.
Luckily, the paper's executive editor, Kevin G. Keene, had agreed to accompany me to the meeting. His willingness to stand behind my request, I think, was the deciding factor in my success. He asked the two city officials to look at the database and report back to us on how difficult it would be to provide a copy. Otherwise, he told them, we were willing to pursue legal action. They agreed and two weeks later I had a copy on compact disc for $20. The chief information officer, on instructions from the attorney, redacted only the names of people who filed complaints. She argued that releasing the complainants' names would violate their privacy rights under state law. I didn't challenge that because I was more interested in the number and focus of the complaints than who complained. (The public records attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State's office later told me he would have sided with the attorney's interpretation if I had appealed.)
The NICAR-L listserv proved to be invaluable during the negotiations. I was able to solicit the advice of veteran reporters who had already gone through what I was experiencing. Every time I dealt with the city attorney I asked journalists on the list about how to respond. I also relied upon the free legal defense hotline maintained by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (www.rcfp.org), which was another very handy resource.
Unfortunately, my suspicions about the shortcomings in the data proved true. The database held two main tables, a listing of building permits granted and the catalog of property complaints - each containing between 10,000 and 15,000 records - dating to 1998. And then there were three smaller tables that referred to fields in one of the two larger tables. But there would be no way for me to quantify the efficiency of all city property inspections. While I could have done a story on how well building inspectors were addressing the complaints they received, I would not be able to provide a similar comprehensive look at health inspectors, who field many more property complaints.
Now the pressure was on. My boss had invested money for me to attend the Boot Camp and his time in helping me get the data. Figuring out what to do once I realized my initial idea would not work was probably the most intimidating part of my first experience with CAR.
Sifting through the data I came across several complaints logged against a man named Prince Charles Eweka, who piqued my interest. It turned out the prince had a fascinating story. The scion of a Nigerian royal family, Eweka was one of the largest property owners in Lowell's low-income neighborhoods. He insisted that he was trying to reinvigorate the area, but the prince's properties had myriad structural problems and a long history of building and health code violations, which he typically did not correct until receiving a court order. But I found all this through interviews and manually reviewing city and court records.
My data analysis was very simple, and Boot Camp had prepared me well for what I needed to know. Using Microsoft Access 97, I focused my attention on the complaint table. I performed a group by name and count query to see which names appeared most often. I didn't have time to thoroughly clean the data, but because the table had relatively few records I printed it and eyeballed it, looking for alternate spellings that had escaped my initial query. I corrected only the names of people who appeared several times. In that way, I came across Eweka and decided to investigate him further.
The story, "The Prince vs. the City," ran in December 2002 and detailed the city's complaints against Eweka.
Looking back, I think my nervousness about developing a story from the data was just first-time jitters. Now that I've incorporated CAR into a story once, I'm much more comfortable with doing it again. Next time, I won't be so surprised if my initial preconceptions aren't borne out by the data. Though I have yet to figure out a way to quantify the efficiency of Lowell's inspection departments, I still haven't exhausted all the story possibilities for the complaint database, and I'm currently using it in another project that involves more data analysis.
Contact Michael Lafleur by e-mail at maolafleur@attbi.com