25 Researchers first told you last week that the website that promises data on police complaints, arrests and use of force is a site with broken links to dashboards that only show error messages.
Investigations have shown that the site has been largely inaccessible to the public since July.
“So they are going to fix that as soon as possible,” Mayor Wu said during an interview at a public event in the city on Friday. Wu said work is underway to restore the site and the public data it should display.
The website belongs to Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency (OPAT).
It has a series of dashboards that promise promising data, from complaints against officers to police use of force.
If the data exists behind each dashboard, you, the public, cannot access it. At least not now and not on the days we checked in the past three weeks.
“The department has been able to continue to receive complaints and maintain contact with residents who have information to share. But they are working very quickly to get that up and running again,” Wu said.
25 Researchers discovered all the dead links after the city itself referred us to them in response to a public records request we filed last year.
In December 2023, we asked OPAT about all complaints it had received about officials and the reasons for handling each complaint.
In September 2024, the city referred us to the OPAT website and said all responsive records are available there on the dashboard.
Only: it isn’t.
We took what we found to the National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter, which has been fighting for better police transparency for decades.
“The way the system is set up now shows that there is no transparency,” said Urzula Masny-Latos, executive director of the guild.
“It’s very important that all of this will be publicly available,” Wu said. “Right now, because they’re having some technical issues with the website, they can get it to people, but we don’t want anyone to have to ask for it; it needs to be available online.”
Returning to our original public records request with the city, we have appealed the city’s response to the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees public records violations.
It took nine months for the city to respond to our request. The law says agencies have 10 business days.
The city of Boston now says it has to give us what we asked for in the next 30 days regarding those officer complaints.
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