Police misconduct is notoriously difficult to track, penalize, and prevent, a problem that advocates have increasingly focused on in the years since the murder of George Floyd. In the time since we published a list of policing resources in 2020, advocates and researchers have been working to collect, analyze, and publish data from public records produced by various state and local law enforcement agencies.

Particularly in the wake of more recent nationally galvanizing killings, this time at the hands of federal ICE agents, these projects offer a blueprint for community members to track and advance law enforcement accountability. We “spotlight” some of these resources here for anyone interested in digging deeper into questions related to police accountability, especially through public records, because we think they offer compelling information and models that can be used or replicated by others. This is by no means an exhaustive list of resources related to police misconduct; several other groups have compiled far more comprehensive lists of available data sources.

Courtesy of: Prison Policy Initiative