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.

As protests of the killing of George Floyd and other black Americans continue, many communities are looking for answers in how to hold police departments more accountable to the communities they serve. In conjunction with today’s training, we’re putting together a collection of resources on how public records can play a small part in that work.

We’re still hard at work putting more polish and finishing touches on the revamped DocumentCloud, but we wanted to share some major improvements now. Better yet, you can go ahead and try them out even without access to the beta.

This Friday, we’re joining together with partners to host a free training for journalists, organizers, and the public to better understand how to use open records to bring more transparency to policing.