What is "FIO"?

Every day in Boston, police officers stop, question, and frisk or search civilians as part of the BPD's Field Interrogation and Observation (FIO) program. The BPD tracks each of these stops in a private database. After a series of lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests, the BPD published the last four years or so of FIO data for public use on data.boston.gov.

Why does this website exist?

The goal of this site is to make it easier for people to learn about police officer activity from the BPD's FIO dataset. While BPD FIO data might be of interest to a wide variety of people, its raw format is hard to work with if you don't have some sort of technical background. By providing an interactive interface, the BPD FIO Browser aims to democratize the process of analyzing this data.

This is an open source project (GitHub) . It is not affiliated with any institutions, BPD or otherwise. Also, it's under active development - if you have any feedback or otherwise want to get in touch, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Usage

The BPD FIO Browser makes it easy to search through and summarize FIO data.

You can filter FIO reports by a single keyword or set of keywords; view all FIOs carried out by a particular unit or police officer; or combine multiple filters of different types to create a specialized view of the data. Click on pieces of data in your search results to drill down even further.

Other Resources

[Coming soon!]