The lack of comprehensive employment history data in Massachusetts is driven home by the launch of a data tool for exactly that information from 17 other states this week.
We are honored and excited to finally share an article that BINJ has worked on with Invisible Institute for months, and that its team in Chicago has put a remarkable amount of resources and time into for more than a year.
We are major fans of their local reporting with big national implications, and jumped at the opportunity to plug our knowledge of Massachusetts institutions into the Pulitzer Prize-winning outfit’s new national project on police accountability.
Here’s an excerpt from the feature, which we are co-publishing with Invisible Institute, The Shoestring in Western Mass, and more than half-a-dozen outlets around the commonwealth ranging from hyper-local weeklies to transparency blogs and Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World newsletter:
Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.
Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.
The lack of comprehensive employment history data in Massachusetts is driven home by the launch of a data tool for exactly that information from 17 other states this week.
The tool, launched by the Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization Invisible Institute and partner organizations, demonstrates what many Bay State journalists and watchdogs experience daily: commonwealth residents are still subject to less transparency than those in other states.
You can read the whole feature, written by Sam Stecklow from Invisible Institute and me on the BINJ side, here. Also thanks to Brian Zayatz from The Shoestring for helping with edits, and to everyone at all the other outlets helping push out this critical story.
