Oversight by Sivil

When I was 17 years old, an officer pulled me over and approached my vehicle with his gun drawn. The officer later stated that he believed the car I was driving was stolen, even though it hadn't been reported as such. Ultimately, he just issued me a traffic ticket and let me go home. What if there was an accessible and transparent solution that civilians could use to submit a complaint that would help prevent incidents like this from occurring again? Oversight is that solution.

There is no national database for Police complaints. This is a priority because in 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked protests in at least 40 countries across every continent except for Antarctica. It was later revealed that the officer that murdered him had six use of force complaints filed against him prior to the murder. The officer was ultimately found guilty and the City of Minneapolis paid a $27M settlement.

According to a 2018 Department of Justice survey, more than 1.2M people in the U.S. either experienced or were threatened with use of force by an officer. Oversight will help cities identify problem police officers before an incident, saving lives and money.

Sivil creates public safety software that seeks to make the world safer for everyone. Our first product, Oversight, is a case management system that helps civilian oversight agencies and internal affairs divisions in Police departments manage compliments and complaints about law enforcement from the community.

A sample use case is when a community member attends a protest and has a negative experience with a Police officer. The community member will visit the customer’s website and click a link that takes them to Oversight. The community member then submits their complaint, the customer manages it until it closes, and the community member receives updates along the way. No other product offers this accessibility and transparency.

Our goal is to help cities make data-driven decisions that increase accountability for officer misconduct, decrease taxpayer money spent on use of force claims, and improve the relationship between Police and the community.

We launched the first version of Oversight in July 2021, multiple civilian oversight agencies are currently beta testing, and we are in the procurement process with a city that has more than 400K residents. We are also in discussions with joint insurance funds (JIFs), which can provide access to Police departments at scale.

In 2020, we started our product development journey by speaking with more than 30 civilian oversight agencies and internal affairs divisions in Police departments about their pain points regarding managing civilian complaints. Case management software was frequently cited as a key issue with almost all research participants indicating their current technology didn’t provide a good user experience, reliable data, and/or a method to easily communicate with civilians. We started developing Oversight with those challenges in mind and stayed in contact with some research participants to continue to get their feedback that helped shape the product.