The Office of Police Oversight publishes official documents about police conduct to inform the public and increase transparency in policing.
We organize police oversight documents into collections by document type or topic. Collections automatically display documents in order of most recently published. This way you can:
- Search by words or phrases in document summaries and document text
- Search by dates that documents were published
- View the author (usually the office or department that created the document)
- Read summaries of the document
- Download the full document as a PDF
Police Oversight Document Types
Different types of documents show information about the complaint investigation process:
- Formal complaint documents are formal complaints filed against the Austin Police Department (APD) or an officer. If the Office of Police Oversight determines a complaint may be a violation of Austin Police Department policy, we publish it in this collection.
- Written reprimands document a form of discipline delivered in writing to an Austin Police officer who has violated APD policy
- Oral reprimands document a form of discipline delivered verbally to an Austin Police officer who has violated APD policy.
- Disciplinary memos document the temporary suspension or demotion of an APD sworn employee.
Police oversight reports and recommendations include responses, communications, and recommendations made by the Office of Police Oversight and Austin Police Department. This collection also includes reports on trends in policing in Austin with a lens of accountability and transparency.
You can view all official complaint and disciplinary documents and search across several document types in a single place.
The Office of Police Oversight may create a document collection based on other factors, such as a series of events in the news. This way we can provide context with several different types of documents that relate to a theme, which means some documents can be found in multiple collections. For example:
- Complaints related to the 2020 protests
- Documents related to officer-involved shooting incidents
- Documents relating to the use of racial profiling in policing
Using the Search Feature
When viewing a document collection, you can filter documents by specific keywords or publication date range. The keyword search searches document titles, summaries, and the content within the PDF unless it is a photocopy.
Official Document Pages
Clicking on the title of a document in a collection takes you to a document page, where you can see:
- The department offering the document, which may differ from the author. For example, the Austin Police Department authors disciplinary documents, and the Office of Police Oversight publishes them.
- All other document collections that contain this document.