The “Blue” is law enforcement
Police misconduct exists across the country in every state, county, city and town. It is often buried behind expensive public records, obscured by an agency’s internal policies, and hidden by the very officers sworn to protect the public. Luckily, due to a few state laws here in Colorado passed in 2019, we have a state database of police misconduct. Sort of.
This project is an attempt to create a better resource that reveals the details of misconduct that the state’s Peace Officer and Standards and Training Board database fails to explain, telling only that something happened, not what or how.
The Newsletter and The Database
The database is a Google sheet I’ve created and keep updated daily with all Actions from the POST database. This allows easy filtering and searching, and information like when an Action was added that is not so easily found on the official site. Additionally, there is the Officers tab where I summarize more aggregate information for an officer such as previous employers, current employer, court cases, reports and other news clips. More details can be found in the data diary of the sheet.
The newsletter is a weekly, short round up of Actions added the week before with notes on anything particularly interesting I could find and a breakdown of involved officers. The first of each month is a longer breakdown of patterns, oddities and anything else I could notice within the last few months of data all together. Each newsletter will also have an explanation of the legality of much of what is in the database and why it’s there.
The Future
Eventually, I hope to have Internal Affairs reports, complaints and any other documents related to the officer with an Action linked to the Google sheet quickly with my own summaries and keywords. But, documents are expensive, and I can’t afford them all right now, even ongoingly. I intend on keeping all this information free and accessible as the public records they are, and hope it will be helpful enough for people to pay and subscribe anyways which would fund the requests for these records.
My goal in this project is to make often obscured and difficult to parse public data easier to access and use for both the curious public and reporters and newsrooms across the state. I hope to bring to light misconduct and discrepancies that otherwise might be buried or impossible to notice — either from lack of funds, attention, or know-how. I can only do so much, and more eyes will always bring more journalism.
About me:
My name is Andrew Fraieli, I cover homelessness, police misconduct and any other social and civil issue that I notice. My experience in the realm of police misconduct and Colorado’s misconduct database came from a series of articles I worked on collaboratively with reporters from Colorado Public Radio, Denver9 News and Colorado News Collaborative. It took thousands of dollars for 100s of records requests and over a year to finish. The main story of the series, and good further context on POST and the database, is here.