Resources

An interactive map documenting efforts to build cop city training complexes around the US, including a spreadsheet with relevant information. As of February 17, 2024, the spreadsheet provides information on any project related to the assessment, planning, approval, construction, or opening of a renovation or expansion of a Public Safety, Police Training, Academy, or Department in any state.

This website was inspired by decades of work by grassroots movements, journalists, civil rights attorneys, academics and policy makers that have advocated for learning from litigation data to improve policing policies, trainings, early intervention systems and accountability. The data was collected by The Legal Aid Society’s Special Litigation Unit Cop Accountability Project team, led by Cynthia Conti-Cook and Julie Ciccolini. It was first collected for Legal Aid’s Criminal Defense Practice defenders and the thousands of clients we serve every year all over the City.

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.