25 Investigates: Boston Mayor responds to concerns over city’s broken police transparency website

BOSTON — 25 Investigates first told you last week the website that promises data on police complaints, arrests, and use of force is a site of broken links to dashboards that only display error messages.

25 Investigates has learned the site has been largely inaccessible to the public since July.

“So, they’re gonna get that restored as quickly as we can,” Mayor Wu said Friday during an interview at a public event in the city. Wu said work was ongoing to restore the site and the public data that is supposed to be displayed on it.

The website is to Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency or OPAT.

It has a series of dashboards promising data from complaints against officers to police use of force.

If the data behind each dashboard does exist, you, the public, can’t access it. At least not now nor any of the days we checked over the past three weeks.

“The department has been able to continue to take in complaints and interacting with residents who have any information to share. But they’re working very quickly to get that back up and running,” Wu said.

25 Investigates discovered all the dead links after the city itself directed us to them in their response to a public records request we submitted last year.

In December 2023, we asked OPAT for all complaints it had received about officers and reasons for the disposition of each complaint.

By September 2024 the city directed us to the OPAT website saying all responsive records are available on the dashboard there.

Only, it’s not.

We brought what we found to the National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter, which has fought for better police transparency for decades.

“The way how the system is set up right now shows that there is no transparency,” said the guild’s executive director Urzula Masny-Latos.

“It’s really important that all of that is going to be publicly available,” Wu said. “Right now, because they’re having some technical difficulties with the website, they can it get it to folks, but we don’t want anyone to have to need to request it, it should be available online.”

Back to our original public records request with the city, we appealed the city’s response with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees public records violations.

The city took 9 months to respond to our request. The law says agencies have 10 business days.

The city of Boston now says it should get us what we asked for on those officer complaints in the next 30 days.

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