Internal Affairs

Boston Police Department (BPD) Internal Affairs Division records

Overview

We present Internal Affairs Division (IAD) cases aggregated from three sources:

These cases include both Citizen Complaints, where a member of the community files a complaint regarding the conduct of an officer or civilian employee of the BPD, and Internal Investigations. A case is identified by a unique number e.g. IAD2019-0412. A given case may accuse one-or-more employees, each with one-or-more allegations. A finding is made by IAD for each allegation against each officer.

For the vast majority of cases, we only have the general nature of the allegations e.g. Neg.Duty/Unreasonable Judge. For a subset of the cases from 2014, we also have brief prose summaries.

Caveats

For civilian employees, we only have a subset of allegation types for the years 2010 to 2020. Specifically: Conduct Unbecoming, Neg.Duty/Unreasonable Judge, Respectful Treatment, Self Identification, and Use of Force. See this Twitter thread.

With the exception of the records from the 2014 Officer IA Log file, we do not have summaries of the alleged conduct; we just have the high-level allegation e.g. “Conduct Unbecoming”

We link an allegation to an officer using the officer’s name. Our algorithm for matching records will not make the link if the name is ambiguous (i.e. if two officers share the same name), however, it is possible a mis-link could happen.

Conversely, it is possible we have an allegation against an officer in our database, but it does not appear on the officer’s page (i.e. it was not linked). You may wish to do a search against the Complaints (Internal Affairs) Data Table, which does contain all cases in our database.

How to Access these Data

We make IAD data available in the following ways:

Data Dictionary

Field Name Description
IA # the Internal Affairs case number; a given case may include multiple allegations against multiple officers
Case # unknown meaning; only in cases loaded from 2001 to 2011 IA Data
Incident Type either Citizen complaint for cases originating from a citizen making a formal complaint or Internal investigation for cases initiated by IAD
Received when the case was opened
Occurred when the alleged incident occurred
Summary a brief summary of the incident; only available for cases from 2014 present in 2014 Officer IA Log
Name the name of the accused officer or civilian employee; this name is provided as it appears in the source document
Title the title of the employee as provided in the source document (may differ from the employee’s current title)
Badge # badge number provided in the source document
Allegation the rule that was alleged to have been broken
Finding the finding by IAD; see Findings below for definitions
Finding Date
Action Take e.g. “Oral Reprimand” or “Termination” — only available for cases from IAD Cases 2010 through 2020-08-15; this data may be incomplete, as many sustained allegations show no action taken

Findings

The IAD determines a finding for each allegation that makes up an Internal Investigation or Citizen Complaint. If we do not know the finding that was made for an allegation, we show N/A (Not Available) instead. Otherwise, one of the findings below will be shown:

Copied from Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. Annual Report 2015, p. 11 and Annual Report 2013, p. 12
Finding Description
Sustained The investigation revealed, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the conduct alleged in the complaint occurred. If it is a criminal case, it is presented to proper prosecuting authorities.
Exonerated The investigation revealed that the conduct alleged in the complaint did occur, but the investigator determined that said conduct was reasonable, lawful, and proper.
Not Sustained There was insufficient evidence to prove or disprove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the conduct alleged in the complaint occurred.
Unfounded The investigation revealed that the allegations in the complaint did not occur.
Pending The complaint is currently under investigation.
Filed Investigation was inconclusive, due to one or more reasons beyond the control of the investigator, and may be re-opened at a later date.

IA Score

We calculate a score from 0 - 5 that indicates the severity of the Internal Affairs Division cases opened against an officer. This score is defined and calculated by The Woke Windows Project. The algorithm which calculates the score and the classification of allegations was invented by us, and is open to change.

IA Score Description
5 Most Concerning. One serious allegation sustained or five concerning allegations sustained across unique cases
4 Very Concerning. Two concerning allegations sustained across unique cases or one sustained Use of Force finding
3 Concerning. One concerning allegation sustained
2 Less Concerning. One less-concerning allegation sustained or five-or-more cases regardless of finding
1 Least Concern. Two-or-more cases regardless of finding
0 Not Concerning. One or zero cases, none with a sustained finding
Classification of Allegations
Serious Violation of Criminal Law, Conformance to Laws
Concerning Neg.Duty/Unreasonable Judge, Respectful Treatment, Conduct Unbecoming, Use of Force, Untruthfulness, Drug Test, Dir./Orders, Self Identification, Directives/Orders, Abuse of Process, Securing and Maintenance of Firearm, Untruthfulness in Department Report, Investigation of Use Of Force
Less Concerning All other allegations

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