As you might have already heard, Flex Your Rights has been working for the past few years on a radical new police transparency website, OpenPolice.org (OP). We built it to help people prepare, file, and track police misconduct reports. In 2020, we pilot-tested it in New York State, Maryland, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and DC to rave reviews. And earlier this month, we opened OP to users throughout the United States.
As a result, we’re seeing a tidal wave of users eager to share their stories with us. In the 12 days since our 50-state launch, we’ve already received 75 new complaints. That’s the equivalent number of complaints we got in the previous 104 days! We’re seeing this rapid growth thanks to our 18,124 active department landing pages, which help us collect on average more than 40 new complaints per week.
As of today, you can review 110 of our first 261 complaints here. Please note that, for a variety of reasons, we don’t publish everyone’s complaint. For example, if users are dealing with related criminal charges, we discourage them from filing with the police or publishing their complaint online. But either way, to help put users on the right path, we review and respond to every complaint we receive.
To scale our capacity to process new complaints, we’re now rolling out our complaint review tools to staff contacts at trusted state and local police reform organizations. We’ve successfully “operationalized” police complaints management for professionals. And with proper support, we aim to establish a national infrastructure for citizen-controlled oversight covering the 18,124 US police agencies within five years.
If you think we’re on the right track, please support our effort by making a tax-deductible donation to Flex Your Rights today!