Contracts
These agreements govern a range of topics, from wages and hours to healthcare and disciplinary procedures.
Project Flashlight shines light on the ways Connecticut's more than 100 police agencies operate in the shadows, because information is power. Too often, local and state governments obscure the most basic information about what police are doing, even things as simple as the contract terms towns have chosen to agree to with police. At minimum, people deserve transparency about what their town and state governments are doing, especially when they're committing guaranteed money to policing and bargaining away options to hold police accountable for misconduct. This project centralizes, summarizes, and maintains information, for everyone to access, about the powers that town and state governments have chosen to trade away to police and the ways in which police have harmed people across Connecticut. Data will not fix our state's system in which police hurt and kill people — especially Black and Latinx people — with impunity. But it is a start, because 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 to instead spend those resources on real public health and safety.
Flashlight will have four sections of data.
Injustice thrives in the dark. 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 to instead spend those resources on real public health and safety. We've been at this work for a long time, and the many attempts at police accountability over the years cannot and will not end police violence or the systemic racism at the heart of policing. 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 2022, and we know that ending police violence and systemic racism in policing requires reallocating money from policing to instead go 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.