Full Disclosure Project

The Full Disclosure Project aims to disrupt the culture of secrecy that systematically and pervasively shields law enforcement misconduct by changing police secrecy laws and empowering the defense community to track police misconduct.

As many recent high-profile cases of police misconduct in the United States have demonstrated, a singularly important, persistent, and corrosive problem throughout the nation’s criminal justice systems has been the lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to law enforcement misconduct.

Failure to expose law enforcement misconduct, excessive use of force, and abusive behavior contaminates the criminal legal systems. It leaves the most abusive officers free to harm individuals and allows everyday police harassment and rights violations in communities to go unchecked.

The project provides defense entities with direct support, training, and technical assistance in implementing a database application to track, aggregate, and analyze bad acts by individual officers and units. The database can host data from a wide range of both public and legally privileged sources, including judicial decisions, lawsuits, community complaints and body cam videos. Through a web application, defense attorneys can immediately and easily search the database, ensuring that police conduct in every case is scrutinized from the first appearance. The project also provides litigation support for obtaining the misconduct information and skills training for trial-level criminal defense attorneys so they can maximize the value of the information.

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The NACDL Foundation for Criminal Justice preserves and promotes the core values of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the American criminal justice system.

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The Full Disclosure Project also works with defender offices, innocence organizations, and other state and local partners to repeal secrecy laws and promote efforts to “de-certify” officers who engage in serious misconduct. In addition, the project is part of a network of academic institutions, press entities, and other stakeholders working to support public online databases of police misconduct.