In openjusticeok/ojo: Access and analyze data from the Open Justice Oklahoma database

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ojo

ojo is a package that assists Open Justice Oklahoma analysts to access and analyze court, jail, prison, and other data collected from various sources.

The pkgdown website for the ojo package can be found here.

Installation

You can install the ojo package from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("openjusticeok/ojo")

After installation, update it with:

ojo_reinstall()

The big picture

The goal of Open Justice Oklahoma is to collect and analyze hard-to-access data in order to better understand our state's justice system. The backbone of our work is our database, which consists of administrative data gathered mainly from courts, jails, and prisons across the state. OJO processes go out to each of these data sources periodically and pull new data into our database. For example, we have OSCN scrapers set up to periodically visit small claims case pages like this one every few days, gathering new data that appears in the course of a case.

We're generally not interested in what happens in a single case, though. What we're really interested in is the aggregate effects. In the case linked above, for instance, we see that the eviction case was filed on January 2, 2019, and granted by default judgment on January 11. We can use our database to figure out how many eviction cases are filed and how many resulted in a default judgment.

This is information that isn't compiled anywhere else, so our database gives us the opportunity to

Exploring the OJO database

To list all tables in the OJO database, use ojo_list_tables(). Any table that is split according to year/casetype is collapsed into the general table in the output to this function. For instance, while you would query the oscn_mins_2019SC table to get minutes from small claims (SC) cases filed in 2019, it appears here as oscn_mins_ to avoid overwhelming the eyes.

library(ojo)

ojo_list_tables()

To see the variables and first 10 rows of a table, call ojo_tbl() on it:

ojo_tbl("oscn_crim_disps")

Pulling data into R

In many cases, you'll only be interested in a particular county, time period, and/or case type. You can now limit the data using the filter() function, then use ojo_collect() to bring the pre-filtered data into R.

d <- ojo_tbl("oscn_crim_disps") %>% 
  filter(court == "ROGERS", casetype == "CM", file_year == 2019) %>% 
  ojo_collect()

The first line points to the oscn_crim_disps table (basically SELECT \* FROM oscn_crim_disps). The second line limits the query (WHERE court = 'ROGERS' AND casetype = 'CM' AND file_year = 2019), so you're only getting the data you want, not querying the entire table. ojo_collect() executes the query, creates a dataframe in R, and closes the connection to the database (disconnect_ojo()). This should mostly eliminate the need for calling connect_ojo() before querying and disconnect_ojo() afterward.

openjusticeok/ojo documentation built on Feb. 2, 2021, 5:47 a.m.