The watch-house ledger
How many children are in Queensland police watch houses tonight, how many are First Nations, and how long has the longest-held child been there?
Where this is up to · updated 2026-07-31
Gate 4 of 6 · Adversarial checkWhat it found
- Our feed is a point-in-time headcount; the official figure averages a daily custody count. They are not the same measure and ours is the lower one.
- Queensland declined to release watch house medical incidents (resourcing) and staffing (officer safety), on the record.
Nightly ingestion
every night since 28 Apr 2026, zero missed
Row-count checks
prediction stated before each read; drift alerts a human
The visual story
format built and reviewed, real figures
This dashboard
live figures with receipts on every number
Long-stay alert
fires when a stay passes 7 days; tuning the threshold
Independent verify script
re-derives every figure; want 5 green runs before we rely on it
Monthly digest pipeline
first digest drafted by hand; automation not yet trusted
Two measures, side by side
Queensland tabled an averaged daily custody count for every watch house (QoN 504 of 2026). Ours runs 20-42% LOWER over the 1-14 May overlap and is a point-in-time headcount, so any crowding read from our figures UNDERSTATES it. Both now returned by the API; the page still shows only ours.
QPS contact
a named person for corrections and right of reply
Historical baseline
the feed starts Apr 2026; earlier data needs an RTI request
A sceptical reviewer
someone outside the lab to try to break the method. Could be you.
Show capacity on the page
the tabled table carries bed counts, which our feed has never had. 207 watch-house months ran over capacity statewide.
This board is the honest state of the experiment. Nothing gets called finished until it survives the checks, and the gaps are listed because someone reading this might be able to close one.
Live · tonight, in Queensland watch houses
Loading the nightly file…—
children in custody
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First Nations children
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days · longest stay by a child
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watch houses holding children
Data sources
QPS daily custody snapshot · open data, CC BY 4.0, every night kept, nothing edited live
Method, in plain words
Plain code counts the government's own nightly file. The feed publishes roughly twice a day, so we use the latest snapshot per day; a naive per-date sum double-counts. No AI writes any published number.
Challenge this
Every figure has a receipt. If you can break one, we want to know, and the correction publishes here at the same volume. Challenge a figure.