National Police Index
Making a Million Police Records Accessible to Everyone
Mission
The Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based investigative journalism nonprofit, set out to build a national database of police employment history. The goal: make it possible for anyone to search whether a police officer with a history of misconduct simply moved to another department. The data existed. What didn’t exist was a way for real people to actually use it.
My Contribution
I led the full UX/UI design of the National Police Index from scratch, working in close co-creation with the Invisible Institute team. Together we shaped the product vision, while I owned the design process end to end: user research and user journey mapping for four distinct audiences, ideation sessions to explore information architecture, paper wireframes, Figma prototyping, structured feedback rounds, and a card-based design system built for accessibility and mobile from day one.
Impact
01 — The Problem
Context
A ‘wandering officer’ is a police officer who leaves one department, often after misconduct, and gets hired by another, sometimes in a different state, with no accountability trail following them. Most people have no idea this happens. Most journalists can’t track it without months of public records requests.
The Invisible Institute, alongside a coalition of more than 20 journalism and legal organizations, spent over two years filing public records requests across the country to obtain police employment history data, state by state. The result: a dataset covering 24 states and more than a million officers. The data existed. The problem was that nobody had designed a way for real people to actually use it.
The Challenge
The dataset had three distinct layers of depth, and each one had its own complexity.
- State: 24 states, each with different amounts and quality of data, visualized on a map.
- Officers: Once you select a state, every officer in that state’s database appears, sortable by start date, end date, or agency.
- Profile: Each individual profile shows badge number, agency, employment period, and in some cases, disciplinary records.
The challenge wasn’t just organizing this data. It was figuring out the right order to present it so a user could find what they were looking for without feeling fatigued by the volume. The hierarchy might seem obvious now. Before we worked through it, it wasn’t.
Before the Redesign
This was the user flow a journalist had to navigate to find an officer’s employment history, before the redesign.
an officer’s employment history
+ grid of state buttons
which state to look in?
across states
Agency · Start Date · End Date
02 — The Users
Understanding the Users
The National Police Index was designed for four audiences, each with different goals:
- Residents: looking up a specific officer or their local department
- Journalists: tracking patterns and cross-referencing names across states
- Attorneys: verifying employment history for legal cases
We created a user journey for each type, identifying where they enter the tool, what they’re looking for, and where they might get lost. That research directly shaped every information architecture decision: one interface had to serve all four audiences without requiring training to use it.
Scroll horizontally to see the full journey map
03 — The Process
Structuring the Data
Early versions of the filter and sort system had too many options visible at once. The relationship between layers — state → officer list → profile — wasn’t immediately clear, and users didn’t know where to start.
Through ideation and collaborative iteration, we landed on a progressive disclosure model: start with the map (pick a state), then see the officer list (sort by agency, start date, or end date), and only when you open a profile do you get the full detail. Each layer surfaces only the information relevant to that step.
The sort options also evolved. Early versions made sense to us internally but didn’t match how users actually searched, most were asking ‘Who has worked at this agency?’ or ‘Who has been here the longest?’ We reorganized everything around those real questions.
After the Redesign
The same journalist. Three steps, no dead ends.
The Experience After
Three audiences. One interface that works for all of them.
From Paper to Figma
The process started with ideation on paper. Sketching by hand let me generate and discard ideas quickly, without getting attached to any visual direction too early.
Once the structure felt right, I moved into Figma to prototype, running user flow validations with the team at each stage. From there: structured feedback rounds, wireframe revisions, and only then into UI design. The process wasn’t linear, some feedback sent us back to the architecture level, rethinking how the layers connected. That’s where the real design thinking happened.
04 — The System
The Map
The entry point for every user type is the map. Before anything is clicked, color communicates what matters most: does my state have data?
The five-status color system — Full Data, Some Data, Coming Soon, No Data (Technical Barrier), and No Data (Legal Barrier) — was designed to:
- Answer the user’s first question without requiring any reading
- Communicate honestly about limitations, not hide them
- Work for all four audiences simultaneously, regardless of technical background
Color isn’t decoration here. It’s the information architecture.
The Card System
The core UI element that makes the National Police Index scannable is the officer card. Each card shows the essential information at a glance, name, agency, employment period, without overwhelming the user. The card system was designed to:
- Work equally well on desktop and mobile
- Scale across datasets of very different sizes, some states have hundreds of officers, others have hundreds of thousands
- Stay visually consistent even when some fields are empty, not all states provide the same data, and that needed to be communicated honestly rather than hidden
Accessibility From Day One
Because the National Police Index is a public accountability tool, built for everyone, not just technically savvy journalists, accessibility wasn’t optional. We achieved WCAG AA compliance across the platform. That shaped every detail: typography sizes large enough to read at a glance, color contrast ratios that hold up across different screens and lighting conditions, and interactive elements sized for touch. It wasn’t a checklist at the end of the process, it was a constraint we designed within from the start.
A tool about public accountability needed to actually be publicly accessible.
05 — The Result
The Result
The National Police Index is live at national.cpdp.co. It’s used daily by residents, journalists, researchers, and attorneys across the United States. The data that two-plus years of coalition work produced is now reachable by anyone with a search bar.
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