CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia is taking a step to holing law enforcement accountable with a new, easy-to-use dashboard.
The dashboard is a tool that allows citizens to see any police officer that has ever been certified to work in West Virginia. With the dashboard, people can see what department a specific officer works for, the other departments in the state they worked for in the past, when they started and ended their employment, and why they left a specific department.
“People have the right to know who is policing their communities,” ACLU-WV Investigative Reporter Kyle Vass told MetroNews.
The information available on the dashboard is nothing that the public can’t already access, but Vass says they’re making things much easier.
“This is a public record, so all we’re doing is taking a public record and making it publicly available so the public can easily access it,” Vass said. “This is information that anybody, in theory, is able to access through the West Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Office, we’ve just taken this and cut out the middleman and made it much easier and more accessible for people.”
According to Vass, the new system ensures the public can keep departments accountable, and he says that’s very needed in West Virginia
“We have an issue in this state with the government broadly making records publicly available. Even though records are public record, oftentimes departments will deny FOIA requests or will get into these protracted arguments on whether or not they have to release these files,” Vass said.
“Our state code is pretty clear when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act. It is the people who decide what records should be seen and not the government to determine which records are good for them or not,” he continued.
You can visit the dashboard here.