PHILADELPHIA – Today, the Philadelphia Police Department and the Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation released its two data sets regarding Complaints Against Police (CAP). “The Complaints Against Police” dataset documents the civilian complaints alleging police misconduct or indicating a problem with the service provided by an officer, including the CAP number, the date the CAP was received by PPD, the district in which the complaint occurred, the complaint’s classification and a summary of the complaint.  The “CAP Findings” dataset provides the CAP Number, the officers initials, demographic details of the police officer involved, the complaint’s classification, the investigative findings and the disciplinary finds. This data set was released in accordance with Mayor Kenney’s decision to sign an executive order updating the City’s policy of sharing publicly civilian complaints alleging police misconduct.

“The release of these data sets is a common-sense reform that I hope will serve to increase transparency and free up the Internal Affairs Bureau to dedicate more of their time to investigating complaints,” said Mayor Kenney.

After the Mayor signed his executive order in August, there were questions from members of the media regarding whether or not they would continue to get copies of redacted CAPs, as the data set only includes initials of officers and not their full names. To resolve this issue, the City has determined that if a reporter wants to request CAPs for a specific officer by name, they may call IAB and they will be provided the case numbers going back five years. They can then cross reference those numbers with the open data set. This system will allow reporters to access this information more quickly and easily, and it will also allow IAB to dedicate more time to investigating active complaints.