Resources

Most local governments spend more on policing and incarcerating local residents than on proactive investments in residents’ well-being. Access to safe and affordable housing, health care, public transportation, and other community services like libraries and parks are essential to residents’ overall quality of life. Yet many communities invest less in these vital activities than in surveilling, arresting, and jailing residents.

This dashboard examines the 2022 budgets of 20 locales across the country. In most of these places, residents pay taxes to and are governed by both a city and county government. Therefore, the dashboard analyzes both the city and county budgets to give a fuller picture of local spending on police, sheriffs, detention, housing, health, and more.

A visual data map tracing the $60 million in ‘private’ capital the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) promised to build Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia.

Around a decade ago, Stop LAPD Spying developed a copwatch practice that we call Watch the Watchers. Copwatch refers to the practice of community members teaming up to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence. Watch the Watchers built on this practice with a focus on surveillance technologies and patterns. You can watch videos explaining our Watch the Watchers work at May Day actions in MacArthur park in 2015, where we exposed LAPD undercover surveillance, and in 2017, where LAPD officers tried to lie about spy technologies deployed to monitor the crowd.

This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community. The website’s ease of use also makes it a political statement, flipping the direction of surveillance against the state’s agents. Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.

The NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database, which the NYCLU obtained through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, is a repository of complaints made by the public on record at the CCRB. These complaints span two distinct periods: the time since the CCRB started operating as an independent city agency outside the NYPD in 1994 and the prior period when the CCRB operated within the NYPD. The database includes 279,644 unique complaint records involving 102,121 incidents and 48,757 active or former NYPD officers.

There have been enormous spending and staffing increases within the criminal legal system (or, as it is more commonly called, the “criminal justice system”) at the city, county, state, and federal levels over the past few decades. Use this map and corresponding tabs to learn more about what has been going on where you live.

Nearly 40% of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI’s national database in 2021 after the transition to a new collection system. The transition creates huge gaps in national crime stats sure to be exploited by politicians in this election year. Use these tables to check on your state and local agencies.

A data visualization tool to see the percentage of city budgets spent on policing in 300 of the largest cities in the US. Data is drawn from annual spending per latest available approved budget and linked back to sources.

In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the United States. In that time there have been more than 5,000 such shootings recorded by The Post.

After Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that the FBI undercounted fatal police shootings by more than half. This is because reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so.

The Post’s data relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings and police reports. Analysis of more than five years of data reveals that the number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained relatively constant.

A comprehensive accounting of police killings since 2013. Includes raw data, maps, and visuals.