The previous cap of 30 was exceeded by over 60% of districts — mostly sparse
groups with small enrollment cells whose Agresti-Coull upper bounds genuinely
extend that far. Analysis across all 51 states (16,279 districts) showed the
median max x-value is already ~56 per 1,000; only truly degenerate cases like a
single predicted arrest in a four-student cell (~250/1000) need capping.
A cap of 100 still guards against these outliers while letting realistic data
drive the axis for the vast majority of districts. The existing 'clipped' flag
and note mechanism remain unchanged — they activate only when extreme values are
encountered.
DistrictSearch built its "most arrests" list from
/estimates?state=XX&year=21-22&limit=500. That endpoint returns rows
ORDER BY LEAID, RACE, SEX at eight rows per district, so a 500-row cap is not a
sample of the state — it is the ~62 lowest-LEAID districts in it.
Measured against California (11,488 rows, 1,715 districts): the old read covered
68 districts, and 6 of the true top 8 were invisible to it. It suggested
districts with 1 and 2 arrests as the state's most notable, while San Diego
Unified (178), Fresno Unified (77) and Kern High (69) never appeared.
Replaced with a committed fixture, public/data/top_districts.json, generated by
scripts/build-top-districts.mjs. The script pages each state to completion using
meta.total from the response envelope and fails loudly on a short read, since a
silent truncation there would reintroduce exactly this bug. 51 states, 135
requests, ~104KB, following the national_rates.json precedent. Re-run it only
when a new CRDC wave lands.
The search screen also loses a multi-second fetch on every visit, and the
hardcoded "Try Derby (KS), Paterson (NJ)" hint goes with it — the real list
supersedes it. Degrades to search-only if the fixture is missing.
fetchStateDistricts() is kept for scripts and ad-hoc use, with its JSDoc now
warning that any short read ranks by LEAID.
pages.yml gains public/** in its paths filter: the fixture ships with the build,
so regenerating it has to be able to trigger a deploy on its own.
jared