Police Rosters

To keep government and police as transparent as possible, we need to start requesting the list of law enforcement on duty. While some police websites will list officers, most of them only give high ranking ones.

This project isn’t just for the local police, but includes county law enforcement (Sheriff Departments), state police, and federal law enforcement.

When asking for information the following template is suggested:

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Please provide the current roster for law enforcement officers. Be sure to include, but not limited to, the following:

1.) Full Name

2.) Badge number

3.) Rank

4.) Date of hire

5.) Salary

Please also provide a list of all inactive and reserve law enforcement officers.

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“Roster for law enforcement officers” could be replaced with the phrase “roster for your entire staff” (be sure to replace the word “Rank” with “Position/rank”and “Badge number” with “Employee number or badge number” in your request). That should give us all law enforcement personnel and the administrative workers as well, if you think that is useful.

Asking for a list of inactive and reserve law enforcement is necessary so department can’t shuffle officers around to hide them. Inactive often means they fail to fulfill training and can’t work until they do. Reserve means people who aren’t working for the department but can be called on at anytime, which means they aren’t always on the master roster list. (Unfortunately, not all departments use these terms properly, which is even more reason to ask for that list.)

Finally, they will most often redact officers who are undercover. You might want to specifically request that they do so to prevent the release of such information from getting stuck in litigation. Or, don’t, so that there is now an outside body with a copy of the undercover agents (again, so they can’t switch people around and pretend someone isn’t employed there when they are).

Finally, in the title try to have it in the following format to make it easier to search:

“City/county, State [Spelled out], Department/Office - Roster”