Today is our first day of dashboard week, and as such we were tasked with building a dashboard around New Orleans police body cam data. The data was fairly interesting, however it was quite messy and didn't provide much use in terms of a data guide. The first issue was the size of the file and the download times as a result of this. To get around this issue, I choose to use the websites API to download certain years of data that would give a good outline of any trends over the last 5 years.
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2022/03/image-283.png)
Here is the flow I ended up using, which drew an API call from two different sources of data. The data source did require an API key to remove the limit on how many records I could download, although this was easy to get hold off. The API call did start to take a while to run and highlighted the importance of caching your workflows to avoid repeat API calls. Once the data was in Alteryx and cleaned, I wanted to explore the possible impact of body cameras on altercations with the police.
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2022/03/image-288.png)
The next stage was to get an Excalidraw of my plan, and then build it in Tableau Desktop. My final dashboard can be seen below:
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2022/03/Dashboard-1-2.png)
Overall, this was a good experience in understanding the timing for both prep and building out an analysis.