How to read a department report card

The report cards on this site put a letter grade on a police department, and a letter grade invites a simple reading: good department, bad department. That reading is wrong, and the cards are built to resist it. Here is what a grade actually is.

A grade is a position among peers

Every graded department is compared only with agencies of the same type and roughly the same size. A small borough police department is measured against other small municipal departments, never against a county jail or the state police. Within that peer group, the site ranks each department on what the records can measure and reports which fifth of the group it lands in. Grade A is the lowest fifth on reported volume and severity. Grade F is the highest fifth.

So an F does not mean "failing." It means this department sits in the top fifth of its peers on the measured quantities. That is a real signal, and it is also a relative one. Move the department to a different peer group and the letter could change without a single record changing.

What goes into it

Three things, each shown on the card as its own sub-score. Internal affairs volume, measured per officer so a large department is not penalized for being large. Discipline severity, which weights a termination more heavily than a short suspension. And the mix of allegations, weighted so that excessive force counts for more than a demeanor complaint. The weights are an editorial choice, and the site publishes them rather than hiding them.^[1]

Reporting gaps do not quietly change the grade. They lower a separate confidence indicator, shown next to the grade with its reasons written out, so a grade built on thin data is labeled as such.

The one caveat that matters most

Higher internal affairs volume is ambiguous. It can mean more misconduct. It can also mean a department that investigates complaints seriously and reports them fully, which is the opposite of a problem. The grade weights volume anyway, because volume is what the record offers, but that ambiguity is the reason a grade is one lens and not a verdict.

Everything a grade rests on is one click away on the department's own page: the raw totals, the individual discipline records, the agency's own synopses. The grade is the site's analysis. The records are the facts. When the two seem to disagree, trust the records, and read the methodology for exactly how the grade was built.