By Aaron Miller-
U.S activists coders have launched a decentralised protocol to document police misconduct reports, which are usually difficult to obtain.
The Police Accountability Now (PAN) Protocol is designed and built on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the Ethereum blockchain, so it can’t be shut down by any central entity.
The aim is for civilians and police officers to file misconduct reports in an anonymous and searchable way, providing officers with a way to break the “blue wall of silence,” or police culture that discourages officers from reporting each other.
The idea for the protocol came about after a Black man in America who had personally had to deal with police misconduct from a very early age, who had an intimate relationship with the problem decided to take action.
Last Tuesday, the protocol launched on the Kovan testnet, a public Ethereum blockchain, covering police departments in the 50 most populous U.S. cities.
It includes links to policies and procedures as well as department logos.
The project asks users to file Freedom of Information Law requests to get officers’ names, badge numbers and other details to help populate the database.
It aims to counteract the systems protections police have historically put in place that make records hard to access. Some are even destroyed after a certain amount of time has lapsed.
A project from WNYC, a New York City public radio station, found records are confidential in 23 states, and 15 of them provide limited accessibility. Only 12 states make the records public.
Review Board
A website launched in 2008 called ‘RateMyCop’ acted as a review board for thousands of cops across the U.S. When it was launched, it contained the names of over 140,000 police officers from more than 500 police departments across the United States. Akin to Yelp, it let users rate and leave reviews on cops.
A few weeks later, the website’s hosting company, GoDaddy, shut it down for “suspicious activity.” The project bounced between other hosting companies, but eventually shut down in 2015.
“Essentially what you’re doing with a website like this is you’re providing an additional disincentive for officers to engage in this conduct,” said Paul Hirschfield, a sociology professor at Rutgers University who is studying the social, political, and legal dynamics that explain why on-duty police violence rarely leads to criminal charges.
“This is potentially more organized than something like YouTube. It’s saying we could put a whole sort of dossier together on you and if there is a pattern of behaviour it would be exposed.”
“We leave vetting and verifying as an exercise to the reader,” said Hampton. “We highly encourage someone to build a follow on adjudication process/protocol that verifies/vets any claim put into the database.”
Doing so involves getting a privacy protecting email address such as Protonmail, signing up for a free github account, claiming some free kETH, and if possible, using a VPN, or virtual private network.
Interplanetary File System
The Police Accountability Now (PAN) Protocol is designed and built on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the Ethereum blockchain, so it can’t be shut down by any central entity. The aim is for civilians and police officers to file misconduct reports in an anonymous and searchable way. By giving people anonymity, the organisers hope to give officers a way to break the “blue wall of silence,” or police culture that discourages officers from reporting each other.
Last Tuesday, the protocol launched on the Kovan testnet, a public Ethereum blockchain, covering police departments in the 50 most populous U.S. cities. It includes links to policies and procedures as well as department logos, with more information to come. The project asks users to file Freedom of Information Law requests to get officers’ names, badge numbers and other details to help populate the database.