Project Flashlight

Shining a light on the ways that police operate in the shadows.


Contracts

These agreements govern a range of topics, from wages and hours to healthcare and disciplinary procedures.

Police Commissions

A police commission is authorized by state law to manage and supervise a town’s police department.

Use of Force

Connecticut law requires all police departments to keep track of any incident where an employee uses "physical force that is likely to cause serious physical injury.

Suits and Settlements

Lawsuits against police employees are one way to exercise control over the way police treat people.

  Our Mission

Project Flashlight shines light on the ways Connecticut's more than 100 police agencies operate, because information is power.

 

This project centralizes, summarizes, and publishes data about the powers that town and state governments have chosen to trade away to police, the systems in place to oversee police, and the ways in which police have harmed people across Connecticut. People deserve transparency about what police are doing, especially when town and state governments commit guaranteed money to policing and bargain away their ability to hold police accountable for misconduct. Data will not fix everything. But it’s a start.  

  What

Flashlight will have four sections of data.

 

  1. The contracts section contains the agreements that Connecticut municipalities and entities have made with police, many of which include measures that limit documentation of police misconduct and keep internal discipline out of reach.
  2. The police commissions section identifies the cities and towns with a dedicated police oversight body, the range of authority that body has, who is on it, and how they were selected.
  3. When complete, the use of force section will include easy-to-navigate data about when police use force "likely to cause serious physical injury" (a definition that exists under state law).
  4. When complete, the suits and settlements section will provide information about police who are sued for their conduct, and what happened in those suits.

  Why

Injustice thrives in the dark. Knowing how police departments work can arm advocates with basic facts and context to counter police misinformation. We hope people will use Project Flashlight's information to push their state and local governments to reduce the size, role, and responsibilities of policing—and to instead spend those resources on real public health and safety.

 

We've been at this work for a long time. In the 1960s, working with the NAACP, the ACLU of Connecticut set up a police complaint office in Hartford's North End. Using a phone hotline and walk-in system, people reported police misconduct to us — 295 times in a single year. In 1971, amid widespread reports of Waterbury police brutalizing and harassing Puerto Rican residents, we convinced prosecutors to drop charges against many of the Puerto Rican residents whom police had arrested that year. In the 1980s, we successfully sued the Connecticut State Police for discriminating against Black and Latinx workers and would-be employees.

 

It's now 2024, and we know that ending police violence and systemic racism in policing requires reallocating money from policing to valuable public services that make our communities safe, like healthcare, education, jobs, housing, food, and infrastructure. Doing that requires ensuring people have the information they need to hold their local and state governments accountable for the size, scope, and budgets of policing.

  This project is step one.