About OpenOversight

OpenOversight is a Seattle Tech Bloc project that aims to improve law enforcement visibility and transparency using public and crowdsourced data. We maintain databases, digital galleries, and profiles of individual law enforcement officers from departments the so called Pacific Northwest that consolidate information including names, birthdates, mentions in news articles, salaries, and photographs.

This is an independent instance of OpenOversight hosted by Seattle regional techbloc. For more info or reporting problems, reach out to TechBlocSEA on Twitter or [email protected].

Try it

This project is a response to the lack of transparency and justice in policing. The public should have the right to know which officers are patrolling their neighborhoods and watching their communities. When officers abuse their positions of power, they should be able to be easily identified and held accountable.

It is the first project of its kind in the United States, and was first implemented in Chicago in October 2016. OpenOversight launched in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area in fall 2017 and in New York City in 2018. A Baltimore instance was launched in 2019 at BPDWatch.com. A Portland instance was launched around the same time at cops.photo.

OpenOversight is released as free and open source software so others can launch similar law enforcement accountability projects in their own cities. The software is available for download and collaborative development on GitHub.

Press Release

In support of demands for greater police accountability, Illinois nonprofit The Lucy Parsons Labs launched OpenOversight, an interactive web tool and accountability platform that makes it easier for the public to identify police officers, including for the purpose of complains. We rely on crowdsourced and public data to build a database of police officers in a city, allowing the public to filter through the dataset to find the name and badge number of the offending officer.

Using OpenOversight, members of the public can search for the names and badge numbers of police with whom they have negative interactions using the officer's estimated age, race and gender. Using this information, the OpenOversight web application returns a digital gallery of potential matches and, when possible, includes pictures of officers in uniform to assist in identification. "The deck is stacked against people harmed by police," says Jennifer Helsby, CTO of the Lucy Parsons Labs and lead developer on the OpenOversight project. "Police are almost never held accountable for misconduct or crimes they commit. To file a misconduct complaint, the burden is on the public to provide as much detailed data about the officer as possible. OpenOversight aims to empower citizens with tools that make it easier to identify officers and hold them accountable."

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Contact and media

Press Release