Cohort 2025
ACT 4 SA
Uncovering Repeat Police Misconduct through a Public Dashboard
Bexar County, TX
San Antonio, Texas, leads major US cities in reinstating officers who have been fired for misconduct, with 70 percent of fired officers being reinstated. To enhance public safety and accountability, ACT 4 SA previously used Catalyst grant funding to develop Cop the Data, a public-facing dashboard displaying police suspensions and terminations from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office. This dashboard aids legislators in reforming police hiring and discipline at the local level that could eventually spur state-level policy changes, educates the community on police officers’ behavior, and assists law enforcement agencies in hiring by providing them with information about officers’ disciplinary histories. ACT 4 SA has since begun expanding the dashboard into a statewide resource by adding data from the San Antonio and San Marcos Police Departments.
Now, with Catalyst grant funding, ACT 4 SA will expand on this project by building a web-scraping tool that pulls data from the National Police Index and the Texas Commission of Law Enforcement’s License Lookup. This enhancement will add a new component to the dashboard, allowing for more comprehensive officer tracking. Currently, users can search by officer name, incident type, and disciplinary outcome and view indefinite suspensions. But connecting multiple records from the same officer can be challenging—especially for officers with common names—because badge numbers change when officers are promoted or transferred to different departments. The new dashboard component will help resolve this issue by linking officer histories across departments and agencies. It will shed light on how police officers with histories of misconduct often move—or “wander”—between departments during their careers, enabling greater accountability and transparency in policing.
Act 4 SA was also a Catalyst grantee in 2022. Read about its 2022 project, Bexar County Police Firings Database.
