(The Center Square) - A statewide police use of force database project funded by the state Legislature was originally intended to go live by April 2023. The database would allow the public to view and download data regarding incidents involving police use of force, which would be reported to the database managers by law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.
Two years later, the database is still not yet operational, and internal emails from recent months point to apparent troubles with a subcontractor that “faked” the site being live, according to one Washington State University employee involved in the project.
WSU was awarded the $15 million contract after it was the only university to submit a bid to the State Attorney General’s Office, which was tasked by the Legislature with overseeing the project.
WSU then hired Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based private law firm, to negotiate its subcontract with IBM, the latter of which ultimately withdrew from negotiations over stipulations regarding its intellectual property, according to a 2024 presentation by WSU Professor David Makin, who wrote WSU’s bid.
In February 2024, WSU signed a subcontract with Carahsoft, a contractor currently under investigation by the FBI, along with Amazon Web Services.
Although the project’s latest January 2025 report to the Legislature that “significant progress has been made in building, testing, and securing the WADEPS data ingestion and management infrastructure,” internal emails reveal that many WSU employees involved in the project expressed frustration over its development.
At the same time, AWS in October argued that certain data requested by WSU “was never planned in-scope….and until yesterday, we were not made aware of the request to add this additional work.”
Later that month, the project’s systems administrator and WSU employee wrote “my frustration is AWS is giving me answers on how to solve the problem without actually understanding the problem.”
By February, the project’s systems administrator emailed Makin and wrote, "I have no idea how to make this work... I am willing to do anything and work excessive hours to make it happen. But when it's not possible... then what?"
In a follow-up email, the systems administrator wrote, “if I had to wipe all data and then reload it as part of a schema change, I need someone other than me explain that to David Makin - because I can't. I can't comprehend or explain that. Where I come from, that never happens.”
By March, the internal emails indicate that AWS had withdrawn from the project, but had “faked being live.”
“I think AWS just left a mess on a rushed exit and so the build failed for multiple reasons,” the systems administrator wrote in a March 12 email to Makin.
When The Center Square reached out to the AGO for comment on the communications, Deputy Communications Director Mike Faulk wrote that “making significant progress and identifying areas that still need improvement kind of go hand in hand. It’s common to find issues when moving from development to production in innovative software. Testing finds bugs, which is what these emails show. AWS is also working with the WSU team on resolving bugs, at no additional cost.”
Faulk also argued that progress had been made in areas including data quality, user accounts, and data ingestion.
The database project has faced other types of setbacks, including obtaining data user agreements with agencies. WADEPS attempted to get signed DUAs with computer-aided dispatch data, also known as CAD, from 911 dispatch centers. However, many of the centers refused to sign over concerns it would violate federal law, while an AGO employee noted to WADEPS it was seeking data outside of the project’s scope.
According to emails obtained by The Center Square, Washington State Parks signed on to WADEPS as a beta tester last year, but pulled out of the project in August. Additional emails revealed that neither the Washington Office of Privacy and Data Protection nor Washington Technology solutions are involved in WADEPS.
The Center Square's ongoing coverage of the AGO/WSU police use of force database project since 2023 was named as a finalist for the 2024 DAO Prize for local investigative journalism.
