foilthepolice.org provides record request templates that you can send to your local police department to track for violent officers escaping accountability and investigate other parts of the department. There aren't enough journalists and lawyers to investigate every PD, so it's on all of us to expose them in each of our communities.
Join our Slack for questions, discussions, and to join a team.
Making it as easy for anyone to investigate their local police department has a few moving parts. Here are some ways you can help:
- help us add record request templates for each state that people can send to their local police departments
- help us compile journalists and lawyers individuals can reach out to if they uncover abuse
- help us design/program this tool to empower people to be first-time investigators help us determine ways records can be uploaded, tagged, and shared for reserachers
- help us find ways to expand the reach and awareness of this tool so people feel empowered to investigate their local police departments and officers
All work that people are doing to further foilthepolice.org is important and helpful. To make it easier to jump in and help, we've defined teams and responsibilities. You are totally welcome to participate across teams.
Help add record request templates for each state. Statutes need to be researched in order to hold clerks accountable to timely and proper responses. As state laws change, templates may need to be edited or new ones added (ex: NY just made police officer disciplinary records no longer confidential, thus FOIL-able)
We want to empower people to investigate their local police but it's early days and no one even knows they have this right and ability. We're looking for people to drive programmatic social/search and/or manage IG
Software is never done. There are host of feature ideas to make this service better for people that need to be built. This is a traditional GatsbyJS site. If you're a developer check the project boards and see the roadmap.
Putting pressure on clerks who are non-responsive often requires dropping the names of journalists, lawyers, news outlets that could be involved. We need help building and maintaing a list of professionals that people can reach out to when they need to elevate what they discover.
Thanks yall,
foilthepolice.org team
and a special thanks to the defund12.org for the inspiration and advice along the way 🖤