We all know there are many sites which offer, or claim to offer, information about court cases. I'm not talking about that. Isn't it of vital interest to the general public to know what the courts are doing? e.g. How one judge usually rules compared to other judges. The crime and conviction rates. The types of crimes people are being charged with. Demographic information could be added to compare court systems in different regions. It seems to me like this should be public information and this information is absolutely VITAL to the public. This information would give us actual numbers and give objective answers and identify problems. In pursuit of this "truth" I emailed my local county clerk of courts asking for permission to write a web scraper to gather this data from their site http://www.courtclerk.org/about.asp?sec=pol (see robots). Of course, they did not respond even though I followed the exact procedure they said to. Also, http://www.pacer.gov/ charges you for information about federal cases. That seems like a good way to make money and to act as if you are being open while in truth completely preventing anyone from discovering the truth. Keep in mind that small things like individual names or gory details of a case could be left out. Making a profit off of this is not the intention. Getting the actual factual truth (THE ACTUAL !#$@ TRUTH) is the only intention. So why is that so wrong?
Contact your local county Supervisor(or whatever you have in your county) and ask for their assistance. What you seem be asking for seems reasonable, but may or may not be allowed by current regulations.
You also need to recongize that manipulating data, and the ability to manipulate data is critical to politicians. I tried to get all of the police departments in our state to use a standardized set of definitions in reporting so we could compare apples to apples and everyone from police chiefs up rejected the idea. They wanted to continue manipulating the data. And, fwiw, that continues up through the federal level.
