Data Specialist

Harris County • Houston, TX

6d • Onsite

About The Position

The Harris County Public Defender's Office is committed to providing high-quality, client-centered representation to individuals accused of criminal offenses who cannot afford counsel. Our office works collaboratively across legal and support teams to advocate for our clients, protect constitutional rights, and promote fairness within the legal system. We value professionalism, integrity, teamwork, and compassionate public service. The Harris County Public Defender's Office seeks a full-time Data Specialist to help build and maintain the office's law enforcement accountability database through Techtivist. This is a data-focused position requiring strong skills in data collection, organization, quality control, and analysis. The Data Specialist will work with complex records and bulk data related to law enforcement accountability. This position is responsible for transforming large, inconsistent, and often fragmented sources of information into accurate, structured, and searchable data. This work is critical to supporting attorneys, investigators, and policy staff in identifying officer credibility issues, patterns of misconduct, impeachment information, and other data that assists in client representation and broader efforts to improve the criminal legal system.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in data science, computer science, statistics, information science, public policy, sociology, criminology, criminal justice, journalism, public administration, or a related field.
• At least two (2) years of experience working with databases, spreadsheets, public records, research data, or other structured datasets.
• Interest in using data to support public defense, law enforcement accountability, racial justice, or criminal legal system reform.
• Strong attention to detail and ability to work with large, complex, and inconsistent datasets.
• Ability to conduct factual research using public records, court records, online databases, and internal records.
• Ability to work carefully with confidential and sensitive information.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in Python, R, SQL, Stata, Tableau, Power BI, or similar tools.
• Experience with data normalization, records linkage, fuzzy matching, probabilistic matching, or deduplication.
• Experience with OCR, PDF extraction, web scraping, text parsing, or document automation.
• Experience with relational databases, data schemas, database imports, or data integrity protocols.
• Experience creating reports, dashboards, data visualizations, or other tools for non-technical users.
• Experience with public records, criminal defense, civil rights litigation, Brady/Giglio issues, law enforcement data, or court records.
• Experience in a public defender office, legal services organization, civil rights organization, policy organization, newsroom, academic research setting, or government accountability project.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and update the office's Techtivist database.
• Collect, clean, structure, and validate data from public records, court records, civil lawsuits, agency rosters, disciplinary records, attorney submissions, case materials, and online sources.
• Work with spreadsheets, databases, PDFs, scanned records, and other structured and unstructured data sources.
• Extract and parse information from documents using OCR, PDF extraction, and other data-processing tools.
• Identify and resolve duplicate records, inconsistent officer names, missing identifiers, conflicting information, and other data-quality issues.
• Link records across datasets, including rosters, lawsuits, complaints, disciplinary records, Brady disclosures, and case-related information.
• Write or run scripts, when appropriate, to clean, transform, match, or import data into usable formats.
• Assist with database structure, data-entry protocols, source tracking, confidentiality designations, and quality-control workflows.
• Prepare, track, and organize public information requests for law enforcement rosters, command structures, policies, misconduct records, and related data.
• Query data and prepare reports, spreadsheets, summaries, visualizations, and other work products for attorneys and staff.
• Protect confidential, privileged, sealed, or otherwise sensitive information.
• Assist with user support, troubleshooting, documentation, and other Techtivist-related tasks.
• Perform other tasks as assigned.

Benefits

• Depends on qualifications

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level