Before I get to the main gist, I am going to talk about another site. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) paid RTI over $10 million dollars to develop a forensic technology center of excellence over the past 5 years. While this effort involved more than just a website, the only thing that lives in perpetuity for others to learn from the center of excellence are the resources they provide on the website.

Once funding was pulled, this is what RTI did with those resources:

The website is not even up anymore (it is probably a good domain to snatch up if no one owns it anymore), but you can see what it looked like on the internet archive. It likely had over 1000+ videos and pages of material.

I have many friends at RTI. It is hard for me to articulate how distasteful I find this. I understand RTI is upset with the federal government cuts, but to just simply leave the website up is a minimal cost (and likely worth it to RTI just for the SEO links to other RTI work).

Imagine you paid someone $1 million dollars for something. They build it, and then later say “for $1 million more, I can do more”. You say ok, then after you have dispersed $500,000 you say “I am not going to spend more”. In response, the creator destroys all the material. This is what RTI did, except it was they had been paid $11 million and they were still to be paid another $1 million. Going forward, if anyone from NIJ is listening, government contracts to build external resources should be licensed in a way that prevents that from happening.

And this brings me to the current topic, CrimeSolutions.gov. It is a bit of a different scenario, as NIJ controls this website. But recently they cut funding to the program, which was administered by DSG.

Crime Solutions is a website where they have collected independent ratings of research on criminal justice topics. To date they have something like 800 ratings on the website. I have participated in quite a few, and I think these are high quality.

To prevent someone (for whatever reason) simply turning off the lights, I scraped the site and posted the results to github. It is a PHP site under the hood, but changing everything to run as a static HTML site did not work out too badly.

So for now, you can view the material at the original website. But if that goes down, you have a close to same functional site mirrored at https://apwheele.github.io/crime-solutions/index.html. So at least those 800 some reviews will not be lost.

What is the long term solution? I could be a butthead and tomorrow take down my github page (so clone it locally), so me scraping the site is not really a solution as much as a stopgap.

Ultimately we want a long term, public, storage solution that is not controlled by a single actor. The best solution we have now is ArDrive via the folks from Arweave. For a one time upfront purchase, Arweave guarantees the data will last a minimum of 200 years (they fund an endowment to continually pay for upkeep and storage costs). If you want to learn more, stay tuned, as me and Scott Jacques are working on migrating much of the CrimRXiv and CrimConsortium work to this more permanent solution.