Who releases police employment records — and how old is it
26 states publish enough for an officer’s work history to be reconstructed. 18 of them are current to 2024 or later. For the 24 that publish nothing yet, the map below says why. Free, and not a background check.
26 states with data1,972,431 officer records18,976 agencies90% current to 2024+
Every figure here is read out of files the reporting agencies made available — some direct, some through intermediaries that obtained them under public-records law. CaseParity presents them as released: it does not investigate, verify or correct individual records, and takes no responsibility for what an agency published.
Select a status to filter the map. Click a state to pin its detail.
Every coverage date here is computed, not quoted
A publisher’s stated update date is prose someone maintains by hand; the file itself carries records with dates in them. Where the two disagree, these pages show the date the data actually reaches and mark the publisher’s claim as stale. It is checkable: the files are public.
An officer’s work history is a public record in some states and unreachable in others
An officer fired by one department can be hired by the next one. Researchers and reporters call them wandering officers, and the only way anyone counts them is by reading employment records across agencies — which is possible only where a state releases them.
So the reporting below is limited by which states release records, not by reporter effort. Where the data exists the count gets made. Where it does not, nobody knows — including the agencies doing the hiring.
Sonya Massey called 911 for help and was shot in her own kitchen. The Illinois deputy charged in her killing had worked for six agencies in four years, carrying a military discharge for misconduct and a case thrown out for lack of evidence, and was hired again each time.
Yale Law Journal — Grunwald (Duke) & Rappaport (Chicago) · April 2020
Thirty years, 98,000 officers, nearly 500 Florida agencies. In an average year about 1,100 previously fired officers — roughly 3% of the state’s force — were working in Florida law enforcement. They were likelier than rookies and than never-fired veterans alike to be fired again or draw a moral-character complaint.
Built on the same Florida employment data the lookup below runs on.
Lucas Thomae identified nearly 700 currently serving North Carolina officers who had been fired by a previous agency. Decertification is not automatic in the state, agencies vary in what they will share, and the series notes that limited data makes wandering officers hard to count at all.
Our North Carolina file stops at 2023-12-31 — older than this reporting.
Sammy Sussman and Chris Gelardi pulled tens of thousands of pages of misconduct records from more than 250 departments, because New York publishes no statewide employment roster. Its decertification list holds over 2,300 officers and misses anyone who left before the list existed.
Officer lookup
Searching a name comes next
What is published here today is coverage: which states release employment and certification records, how far each state’s file actually reaches, and the reporting that explains the gaps. Every number on these pages is read out of a committed copy of those files.
Name search runs against a database rather than a file, so it ships in the next phase. When it does, a record will surface only as a result inside a search — no page will exist for an individual officer, and no URL will enumerate one.
Retrieved 2026-08-29. States that publish nothing carry their reason on the map above — 7 are being processed by the source, 17 are not released by the state.
CaseParity is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.