Since June, more than 500 MuckRock readers have nominated their local police agencies for public records requests seeking data on the restitution paid to settle misconduct lawsuits. The data begins to provide some insight into how police misconduct has been handled so far in a particular agency and in what cases misconduct is substantiated or compensated when challenged.

As part of our ongoing COVID Public Info training series, we’re excited to host Julia Raifman and Kristen Nocka to discuss their work and findings from COVID-19 US state policy database (CUSP), a project to obtain and analyze as many state-wide emergency orders and mandates as possible. Here are resources referenced during the discussion, as well as ways to get future updates from COVID Public Info.

States’ reopenings have largely been a sort of experiment, one that many now need to adjust as cases and deaths from the deadly virus continue to rise. Check out our newest training and the highlights from FOIA news this week.

Improving the speed and helpfulness of our customer support operations has been a major priority over the past year. We’ve cut down the average time-to-response by about 75 percent, but we know we can still do better. To help with that, we’re moving our support software to Zendesk, so you might see some minor changes in the coming weeks.

Do mask mandates matter? Were governments that shut down schools sooner making the right call? Julia Raifman, assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, has been organizing the COVID-19 US state policy database (CUSP) to collect and analyze state-wide mandates from across the country to help answer these questions and inform future policy. This Thursday, she shares what she’s learned in a question and answer session with Garance Burke.

Nationwide, there have been horrific instances of police force that avoid prosecution despite appearing closer to abuse or even murder rather than law enforcement. How is that allowed? We’ll help you find out.

Today, MuckRock’s Beryl Lipton and Open the Government’s Freddy Martinez will be featured in a training session hosted by the Project on Government Oversight. In coordination with that event, we’ve compiled some fast thoughts on how federal oversight and resources can complement local and state research and policy developments.

Despite COVID-19’s disappearance for a few weeks from the top headline spot, the virus is still very much among us. Here’s the story public records helped tell even as public attention shifted.

Over the course of the next week, a few brave newsrooms are getting upgraded to the new DocumentCloud platform, which offers a variety of improvements from speed and search to mobile-friendly annotations. Here’s how to cut to the front of the line or ask for a delay.

On June 26, we held our first COVID Public Info training, giving journalists, researchers, and everyone else tips, tricks, and templates for using transparency laws to dig into public records. We covered ground like how to adjust your approach as governments still operate at reduced capacity, as well as called out some specific stories that used transparency to dig into key issues.

Over 500 volunteers have sent in suggestions to our MuckRock Assignment asking to submit local police departments as candidates for more transparency around the money spent by police departments to settle or battle lawsuits.

At least 12 New York state police departments claim to have no records of officer misconduct from the past 50 years, according to responses to Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.

As protests for police accountability and reform continue, transparency changes are already taking place in cities across America — even as public records show emerging new challenges.

We’ve loved seeing the creative ways users have used our Assignments crowdsourcing tools, from digging through documents to building petitions. Now, to help newsrooms quickly gather answers to big questions, we’ve created an experimental spinoff of Assignments designed to help organize volunteers in gathering and label large amounts of data no matter where it may live.

A New York state senator blasted MuckRock’s latest transparency project to access police disciplinary records, calling it an “unintended consequence” of recent legislation designed to allow access to police disciplinary records.

We’re offering a free training session and plenty of ways to demand transparency in the midst of a pandemic and the movement for police accountability.

Last week, we released support for “flat pages” on DocumentCloud, which we use to host documentation, about pages, and more.

This Friday, we’re hosting the first of a number of ongoing free trainings focused on uncovering how COVID-19 is impacting communities around the United States. Come join us, and subscribe to the project newsletter to get first look at key data sets, free training, and more.

Join hundreds of others demanding to know how our tax dollars are going to defend misconduct suits. Take a minute and add your local police department to our work.

In this week’s roundup, a look at policing transparency efforts around the country, as well as ways that you can help bring transparency to your own community.

For almost fifty years, police disciplinary records in New York state have been kept confidential under the state’s Civil Law Section 50-a. That all changed last week, and now we’re working to make as many of these previously secret documents public as we can. Here’s how to follow along.

Get up to speed faster with the DocumentCloud Beta with our updated Python wrapper for using the API.

Major changes in public records laws are being considered — and passed — after protests over the killing of George Floyd. Reporters share their favorite data, request ideas, and how you can open up your local law enforcement.

Lawmakers in both houses of New York’s legislature voted to repeal Section 50-A of the state’s civil rights law, a move intended to eliminate the barrier between the public and police disciplinary histories.

Over the coming months, we’re migrating newsrooms to the new version of DocumentCloud (don’t worry — you’ll get a notification before anything changes!). Along with the updated version of the site, we’re also moving to a new API. Anything you can do through the web interface you’ll also be able to do through the API, so we’re excited to see what kinds of new integrations you build.