Where can I find the most complete listing of police departments
including name, address, city, state and zip code. Additional fields
that would be very useful would include website URL, name of cheif,
name of county (for sheriff's departments). I need this information
in a form that can be managed in Excel or Access or Outlook.
I need the same list for sheriff departments as well.
Note, for PD's I found
http://www.leolinks.com/search/Law_Enforcement/United_States/index.shtml
but its my impression that this is a list containing only PDs that
have a website, so it may not be very complete.
I'd be willing to pay someone to compile this list if it requires
piecing various sources of information together. |
Request for Question Clarification by
scriptor-ga
on
17 Jun 2004 07:31 PDT
Dear croix,
I have found a very extensive directory of Police Departments and
Sheriff's Offices in the USA. Of course, there is no way to exactly
determine its degree of completess, but it looks extremely promising.
However, the data needs to be extracted since it is not in any of the
formats you mentioned. I doubt that anyone would be willing to do this
manually, because of the huge number of entries. So someone with
experience in the field of automatic data extraction who can code a
program for this purpose should do it.
Do you want me to give you the web address of that directory as an
answer, so you can post a second question with the task of extracting
the data?
Regards,
Scriptor
|
Request for Question Clarification by
rainbow-ga
on
17 Jun 2004 09:47 PDT
Hi croix,
I have located several very comprehensive directories for sheriff and
police departments. However, as my colleague Scriptor has suggested,
compiling this information in a format you require would be extremely
time-consuming. I would be willing to manually compile this
information in either an excel or word document format if priced
appropriately.
Please let me know your views.
Regards,
Rainbow
|
Request for Question Clarification by
pafalafa-ga
on
17 Jun 2004 12:24 PDT
There are more than 18,000 police departments and sheriff's
departments in the US.
A commercially-available list of all of these (plus fire departments,
specialty police, etc) costs several thousands of dollars to purchase
for unrestricted use.
However, is possible to "rent" lists for limited use (e.g., for a
one-time mailing) for much less.
Let me know if you would like information about this option as an
answer to your question.
pafalafa-ga
|
Clarification of Question by
croix-ga
on
17 Jun 2004 21:06 PDT
I am putting together a business plan at this point, and was
anticipating my need for contact information for future use.
Scriptor: "Do you want me to give you the web address of that directory as an
answer, so you can post a second question with the task of extracting
the data?"
-->Croix: No, not at this point. I found the FBI crime index data and
think this may give me the answers I need at this point. I may come
back to you for this at some point though. Thanks.
Rainbow: "compiling this information in a format you require would be extremely
time-consuming. I would be willing to manually compile this
information in either an excel or word document format if priced
appropriately."
-->Croix: I have no idea the ball park you are talking to get this
done, but it does not sound realistic with thousands of departments,
plus manual compiling will create human errors in the data and make
the database unmaintainable. Thanks.
Pafalafa: "However, is possible to "rent" lists for limited use (e.g., for a
one-time mailing) for much less."
--Croix: I may come back to this if I get off the ground and want to
market them. I have no need for the list unless I can slice and dice
the data to get my answers and I have a feeling the rented list will
not permit that. Thanks.
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