Bad Apple provides a searchable database of Public Records Act templates, allowing anyone to easily and properly request records pertaining to a specific officer or incident involving police misconduct or police surveillance technologies (such as drones, stingrays, or predictive policing software).
If your state has a public records act or similar law, you can file a request by pasting the result from your PRA Template search into MuckRock. Our PRA templates have been tested time and again, and are specifically crafted to be as concise, comprehensive, and effective as possible.
If you do not feel comfortable filing a PRA, but have good information that should warrant a PRA request, please submit a tip, and we may file a PRA for you.
Use our Oversight Lookup tool to find police and sheriff oversight commissions in your area.
Oversight commissions are an important resource for holding law enforcement accountable. If you've experienced or witnessed police misconduct, wish to follow up on a prior incident, or have relevant questions for the commission, our oversight commissions database can help you find and get into contact with the right people.
If you have knowledge of police misconduct but are not comfortable filing a complaint with one of the oversight commissions in our database, please submit a tip, and we will do our best to get that information to them.
If you know of a commission that is not in our database, please submit a tip or email Info@BadApple.tools with a link to their official website and we will consider adding it to our database.
The Bad Apple Database allows anyone to look up information on officers that have had sustained findings against them for misconduct. This database is an important tool for screening officers, and ensuring that those who have records of misconduct aren't simply shuffled around to new locations each time they have a sustained finding against them, escaping responsibility and putting more people at risk.
All of the information in the database comes directly from Internal Affairs or an oversight commission, and is copied word-for-word from their official, post-investigation report. Any findings other than “sustained” will be clearly marked as such in the database.
Using the database, you can immediately find the details from any Investigative Reports about a particular officer, neatly organized to display all of the relevant information. You will also have the opportunity to view the full report at any time. All Investigative Reports are stored at the Internet Archive and listed in this index.
If you are uncomfortable with filing an official complaint because you fear retaliation, you can take advantage of our private tip form to provide us with any relevant information (such as the officer's name and the date, time, and location of the incident) that could be used to file a public records request or passed on to the appropriate oversight commission.
Please note that many oversight commissions do not allow complaints to be filed anonymously, but if the commission already has the officer on their radar, your tip may (further) encourage an investigation.
We do not save or associate any identifying information with your tip, including but not limited to your IP address, user agent, and location. If you are concerned about maintaining your privacy, we recommend using our onion service (using Tor Browser) when submitting your tip.