Blue Surveillance Database

Below are two tables: "Actions" and "Officers".

"Actions" is a live-updating, searchable and filterable copy of Colorado's Police Officer Standard's and Training Board's database of officer disciplinary actions. Besides what is visible on POST's website, my database contains the additional column of the date when the action was added to the database.

"Officers" aggregates all the information on POST's database per officer. It also includes additional information I have gathered from public records — such as Internal Affairs investigation reports, resumes, job applications, termination letters, court records, etc. — or other public facing information such as employment history gathered from an officer's LinkedIn profile.

The data diary below will explain some nuances of the databases.

Data Diary

Details and a bit of house-keeping

  • POST itself states on their database: "POST Board routinely updates the database monthly. While POST Board uses reasonable efforts to include accurate and up to date information, POST Board cannot guarantee that the information found here is accurate and up to date. POST Board makes no warranties as to the accuracy of the content and assumes no liability or responsibility for an error or omission in the content." The same applies to my database. I try my best to be accurate and up to date — sometimes correcting POST's database — but I cannot guarantee perfection when the bulk of the information is coming from POST.
  • Keep in mind for statistics that January 1, 2022 is when Colorado state law required agencies to began reporting various actions to POST. Information on the database before then is limited to decertifications: be aware when filtering and ordering, and be cautious of the effects of this on statistics.
  • The database is not all the information on where an officer may have worked in the past, only prior agencies I have found, or prior agencies the database points to due to past actions from different agencies.
  • Records and information from 2019-2022 were collaboratively acquired by Zach Newman, Alison Sherry, Susan Greene, Brittany Freeman and myself (Andrew Fraieli). Records beyond that, I have acquired directly from their original agencies. The only modifications there might be to the documents are possible redactions of my own because of the failure of an agency to redact personally identifying information.
  • A 0 under "Actions" means that the officer previously had an action written down during research for the COLab project, but the action has since been removed from the database. There is also a missing actions number tab.
  • Decertifications are often grouped together not necessarily because they all happened at the same time or are related, but because the POST Board meets quarterly, and that is when decertifications are rubber-stamped.
  • "No Cert" in my database refers to the POST database stating an officer does not have certification, but there is no decertification action. It could be the person was a deputy not needing certification, or they were decertified and the system is inaccurate.
  • The "Began" column tracks the date "Current Employing Agency" was updated on the POST database. It is not necessarily an exact date the officer actually started at the agency.
  • The "Other Court Cases" column is for court cases I've found that the officer has been involved in, sometimes relevant to decertification or employment changes, sometimes not.
  • For some reason, the time stamp extract from the database under "Added to Database" is seven hours ahead of MST.

Besides that, please feel free to email me at database@bluesurveillance.org with questions on the data, inaccuracies noticed, and if there are further clarifications needed on the documents, gathering methods, or more.

And if publishing data or documents from this database — or it's been helpful for research — please attribute and link to Blue Surveillance.