OpenOversight

OpenOversight is a Lucy Parsons Labs project to improve law enforcement accountability through public and crowdsourced data. We maintain a database of officer demographic information and provide digital galleries of photographs. This is done to help people identify law enforcement officers for filing complaints and in order for the public to see work-related information about law enforcement officers that interact with the public.

This project is written and maintained by @lucyparsonslabs with collaboration, partnerships, and contributions welcome. If you would like to contribute code or documentation, please see our contributing guide and code of conduct. You can get a tip for implementing important issues. If you prefer to contribute in other ways, please submit images to our platform or talk to us about how to help sort and tag images. This project is in public beta, and we are currently soliciting photographs to add to the database.

Note to Law Enforcement

Please contact our legal representation with requests, questions, or concerns of a legal nature by emailing [email protected].

Issues

Please use our issue tracker to submit issues or suggestions.

Tips

We offer financial tips as a thank you for certain issues being implemented. Please view issues labeled tip to see which contributions are eligible for tips. If you do not want a tip for that contribution, just include "#notip" in your PR description. The amount of the tip depends on the size of the ticket: S ($20), M ($50), and L ($100). Tips are provided once your contribution is merged in (i.e. contributions must have the appropriate unit tests).

Developer Quickstart

Make sure you have Docker installed and then:

git clone https://github.com/lucyparsons/OpenOversight.git
cd OpenOversight
make dev

And open http://localhost:3000 in your favorite browser!

If you need to log in, use the auto-generated test account credentials:

Email: [email protected]
Password: testtest

Please see CONTRIB.md for the full developer setup instructions.

Documentation Quickstart

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
make docs

Deployment

Please see the DEPLOY.md file for deployment instructions.

What data do I need to set up OpenOversight in my city?

• Officer roster/assignment/demographic information: You can often acquire a huge amount of information through FOIA:
  • Roster of all police officers (names, badge numbers)
  • Badge/star number history (if badge/star numbers change upon promotion)
  • Demographic information - race, gender, etc.
  • Assignments - what bureau, precinct/division and/or beat are they assigned to? When has this changed?
• Clear images of officers with badge numbers and/or names displayed: Scrape through social media (as we have done) and/or solicit submissions.