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CHARLESTON, W. Va. – The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia (ACLU-WV) has launched the Police Accountability Dashboard. The dashboard allows users to look up any police officer who’s ever been certified to work in West Virginia and track the officer’s employment history, including what dates they worked at previous departments and if they left that department on good terms, were fired, or resigned while under investigation.

The dashboard is hosted on Dragline, a project run by ACLU-WV Investigative Reporter Kyle Vass, and can be accessed by visiting http://dashboard.dragline.org

"Our communities deserve to understand the law enforcement agencies that serve them," Vass said. “This platform empowers West Virginia residents with critical information about how, where, and by whom their communities are policed.”

The Dashboard serves as a publicly available tool for parsing public records maintained by the West Virginia Division of Administrative Services. In previous years, ACLU-WV has used these records internally to understand employment records of police who face public scrutiny for alleged misconduct.

For example, this set of records was used in determine exactly when the town of White Sulphur Springs hired Timothy Loehmann, the officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Using these records, we were able to confirm that the town had hired Loehmann four months before the public was made aware of his hiring.

Now, anyone with an Internet connection can access these records in the form of an intuitive map tool. Users can look up individual officers or search through entire departments to learn more about the histories of police officers in their communities.

Additional features allow users to cross reference demographic and socioeconomic data for counties in the state and visualize the distribution of active law enforcement personnel statewide.

The platform aggregates data from multiple authoritative sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau and the West Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards office, presenting it in an accessible, user-friendly format. Users can explore information through an interactive map that highlights diversity indices, poverty rates, and officer distribution across all 55 West Virginia counties.

"The police hold unique power in our society. Abuse of that power results in loss of rights, life and privacy. The public has a right to demand transparency to know who has wielded that trust and power irresponsibly," ACLU-WV Executive Director Eli Baumwell said. “In addition to providing this resource to the general public, we will also coordinate with public defenders and prosecutors across the state to make sure they have this information readily available for consideration in criminal cases.”