Help and Information

The Woke Windows Project consists of many data tables and types. This data is pulled from multiple sources.

When you are viewing any type of record, e.g. an incident report or an employee, there will be a section Source Materials. This section lists the data sources from which this record was derived and provides links to them. You can use these original sources to confirm any information from the Woke Windows Project.

Do you have questions? Advice? Compliments or critiques? Please reach out to us at . Any and all feedback is welcome.

Articles

We provide links from each officer record to different news articles and publications referencing that officer. Most of these links were generated using an automated process that looks for instances of the officer's name in a selection of articles. This selection is limited to articles that mention or are about the Boston Police Department. This process is not 100% reliable; in certain cases (e.g. if another person mentioned in the article happens to share a name with an officer), an officer may be linked to an article that does not in-fact mention them.

In addition to the automatic process, some articles have been manually added. If an article was manually added, or if it is an automatically added article that has been confirmed by a human being, a green checkmark is shown next to the article in the articles table. If the article was automatically added and has not been confirmed, it is shown with a gray checkmark ?

We currently import articles from the following sources:
The Bay State Banner
The Boston Globe
Boston Herald
The Harvard Crimson
Universal Hub
WBUR
WGBH

bpdnews.com
The official website of the Boston Police Department

Pax Centurion
The official newsletter of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA). Learn more on our Pax Centurion page.

Civil Service Commission Decisions
These are decisions rendered by the Civil Service Commission. An employee may, among other matters, appeal a suspension or termination to the commission.

CourtListener
Opinions from federal courts and Massachusetts state appellate courts.

Data Tables

Complaints (Internal Affairs)

See the dedicated Internal Affairs help page

Field Contacts (FIO)

Field Interrogation and Observation (FIO) reports are how the BPD records the department's stop-and-frisk encounters (and other encouters, many of which do not involve a search).

Per Rule 323: "An FIOE Report shall be submitted subsequent to a field interaction/stop, a frisk, an observation, or an encounter".

We ingest the cleaned BPD FIO Data provided at jacoblurye/bpd-fio-data (thanks @jacoblurye!) That data was sourced from the FIO Records FieldContact Table and FIO Records FieldContact_Name Table exports distributed on the Analyze Boston website.

These reports are especially interesting because they 1. contain redacted prose narratives of the encounter and 2. contain a breakdown of the race and ethnicity of the individuals involved.

If the Frisked / Searched? flag is Yes, this indicates that at least one of the stopped persons was searched. Beginning in September 2019, the search flag is also marked for each individual.

Incident Journal

When an officer responds to a call, carries out a search warrant, or otherwise performs a significant action, they fill out an incident report (sometimes referred to as Form 1.1). The BPD makes available a selection of fields from these reports through two public data sources: Crime Incident Reports and the Public Journal. In addition, reports from 2012 - 2015 are taken from the Legacy Crime Incident Reports. We combine these data sources to create the list of incidents on this site.

We automatically import new incident reports from these data sources on a daily basis.

It's not clear if all incident reports are included in these public data sources, or if some sensitive categories are being filtered out. In addition, the routinely published information only captures a subset of the fields an officer enters when they submit these reports.

A full incident report contains information about the people involved and a written narrative of events. Due to privacy concerns, the department will not release a full report without first applying redactions.

To see the difference between a full report and what's available on this site, contrast the full (redacted) report for incident #172068118 and our record for that same incident.

Paid Details

A paid detail is when an officer is paid by a private company to direct traffic (e.g. around roadwork by a utility company) or to provide security. These companies put in a request for a police detail with the department, and then officers sign up for these shifts in addition to their regular hours.

We currently only have records for the year 2019. This data is sourced from Detail Records 2019.

The contract between the department and the police unions stipulates that an officer is paid for a minimum of four hours of work, regardless of the number of hours actually worked. This rule among others explains the discrepancy between Hours Worked and Pay Hours you will see when browsing these records.

For more information regarding department policies for paid details, see Rule 325 and Rule 326.

Officers & Employees

Our goal is to present information regarding every sworn officer of the Boston Police Department. We also include some data on civilian employees of the department, but this is a lower priority. In order to link the data together effectively across multiple data sources, and to ensure we do not have duplicate entries, we only create records for those persons where we have the six-digit City of Boston employee id number.

We currently harvest the employee id number from three sources: BPD Alpha Listing with Badges, 2020 Alpha Listing, and Public Journal. If a particular employee does not exist in any of these sources, they will not be listed on this site.

On the page for each employee (see the page for Commissioner Gross as an example) the officer's annual earnings are broken down by category. The data for this report is sourced from the Employee Earnings Reports produced by the City of Boston Office of Human Resources. The HR office supplies this explanation of the different categories.

Detail pay deserves special mention. This is pay earned by working paid details under the procedures described in Rule 325. The city should be receiving compensation from the private business that requested the detail.

Zip Code and Neighborhood

The zip code where the officer lives is taken from the most recent Employee Earnings Report on which the officer appears. The state and neighborhood fields are calculated based on the zip code. The mapping of zip codes to neighborhoods was taken from the Boston Business Patterns 2016 report.

Organizations

The Boston Police Department is made up of over 150 sub-organizations. Currently, our list of organizations is pulled directly from the Officers & Employees list, and each organization's overview page contains only a list of officers and employees who are or were members of that organization.

For more detailed information about each organization, consult the BPD's organizational structure document (Rule 101).

Forfeiture Cases

This information is currently imported from a single source: Forfeitures by Suffolk District Attorney.

SWAT Reports

We have redacted SWAT incident reports covering 2010 - 2014 from 17F SWAT After-Action Reports. These reports were provided as several-hundred page PDF documents, each spanning an entire year. We've broken each incident out into an individual file, and we've run OCRmyPDF on those individual files.

We automatically discover the officers involved in each action based on their names and employee ids. Because the OCR process is not 100% reliable, there may be errors and/or omissions in the fields we parse out.

Traffic Citations

See the dedicated Traffic Citations help page

Data Sources

See Data Sources.

https://bpdnews.com/rules-and-procedures
Great resource for understanding the Boston Police Department (from the department itself).

Data for Justice Project
Lots of useful resources and tools from ACLU Massachusetts.

CrimeSOLV
Tables and charts of crime data; compiled from data submitted by departments throughout Massachusetts.

BPD FIO Browser
Cool project for browsing/searching FIO reports.