When you file a complaint against an Austin Police Officer, any information you share will be kept confidential, unless and until an event causes it to be made public. This could include the case going to criminal court, which means it could be subject to discovery. In such cases, we redact any contact information if it was provided, but not the names.
If you provide your email address, your complaint is automatically emailed to you and the Office of Police Oversight and stored on a Microsoft Exchange server. It is then reviewed by a staff person in the Office of Police Oversight, then manually entered into a database shared with Internal Affairs, a division of the Austin Police Department. For purposes of trend reporting and analysis, we enter non-anonymous complaints into a separate Sharepoint database.
We also use your data to find trends and patterns in complaints and thank-yous, and make policy and training recommendations to the Austin Police Department accordingly.