What is the source for police records?

Police employment records are retrieved from public records collected and made available by the National Police Index (NPI) and Open Oversight Virginia .

• NPI Github Repository (data files)
• OpenOversight VA (data files)

Not all states have made information available. NPI publishes which states have released information is available on the NPI website . We don't import the project's information automatically, so if we miss any significant updates, feel free to send us a reminder .

Why include this information?

Flock partially redacts its audit logs by truncating the names. For example, "Bernard Barker" will be logged as "B. Bar." As the statistics page shows, the number of searches conducted is staggering, and some very large organizations organizations make use of the Flock system. An identifier like "B. Bar" is ambiguous in such contexts—it provides insufficient information for any audit.

To address this, we use a name resolution system that attempts to match these abbreviated names to full names from police employment records. See our Name Resolution Methodology page for details on how this works.

In many cases, police agencies don't publish personnel rosters, and the reasons and case numbers entered into Flock are often missing or non-descript. Often, the best a person could do to attempt to find out why their plate was searched is ask an agency about an "investigation" by "B. Bar" at a certain time. By adding critical contextual information, we hope to help close that gap.

What does "No employment records found" mean?

It could mean one of several things. Some possible explanations:

• The NPI dataset is incomplete
• The "Flock name" does not match the official name in the NPI dataset
• The operator is not a police officer ^*

^* Despite frequently claiming only "sworn officers" at criminal justice agencies have access, Flock routinely grants accounts to non-officers.

Employment Data Coverage by State

The table below shows which states have employment data available and the date ranges covered. The dates below show the earliest reported termination date for an employee in that state, and the latest reported start date. For Virginia, many records do not include employment dates; placeholder values are used for now.