Marsy's Law was supposed to help victims. In Jacksonville, it shields police officers.

Five years after the FBI started tracking how often police use force, the majority of police departments still fail to comply and the FBI refuses to release publicly what information it has collected. The policy was enacted in response to the realization that no one had definitive data on how often the police kill people, use teargas, or other incidents of force. What little data exists showed racial disparities in whom police use force against. But compliance was made voluntary and the FBI made public release of the data contingent on 80% of police departments complying, a goal it's nowhere near.

Once viewed as one of the nation's most brutal and corrupt police departments, New Orleans Police Department has earned steadily improving public support with a host of reforms. One reform that it took voluntarily, and in contrast with common practice in Louisiana, is to quickly release body-camera videos of police shootings and other uses of force. Though its effect is hard to untangle from other initiatives, video releases have become routine. In one case, a video prompted an official apology after proving rubber bullets were used against protesters. This helped lead to new restrictions on crowd control.

When New York legislators abolished a state law that had long shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from public scrutiny, they were not just responding to recent protests but also to activism over many years by reform advocates and families of victims of police violence. Long-running legal challenges had failed to pry the records loose. But activists – opposed by police unions and their allies – had used public testimony, publicity, and their families’ stories to lay the groundwork for changes that then came quickly after George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests of police brutality.

When a new California law unlocked the disciplinary records on misconduct from 700 police agencies statewide, competing news organizations formed the California Reporting Project to accomplish as a team what would have been daunting, if not impossible, for each news organization individually: compile a database of all the records as they are released. Just months into the project, the resulting news stories informed the public of officers who escaped serious consequences for misconduct, and whose careers benefited from keeping the public unaware.

More than 30 California news organizations collaborated to gain access to, and publish news stories about, previously secret police disciplinary cases. Filing more than 1,100 records requests with more than 600 law enforcement agencies, members of the California Reporting Project leveraged each others' resources rather than competing to tackle the massive reporting project made possible by a new state transparency law. The collaboration is an example of local and regional partnerships that have helped a struggling news industry still cover local and state government news.

After the South Carolina legislature in 2005 began requiring police to enforce a seat-belt law with traffic stops, it imposed on all police departments a duty to track and report traffic-stop data on drivers' race. The law was meant as a way to prevent biased policing, through public disclosure of disparities. But only about one-third of the state's law enforcement agencies have consistently complied with the law, and some never have. Some blame ignorance of how the system should work. But another explanation is the state has done little or nothing to enforce the law.

Body-worn cameras gained popularity as a potential check on police brutality, but for them to fulfill that purpose, numerous changes in typical public policies are needed, starting with public access to videos and independent oversight of camera policies. Research is inconclusive about whether cameras have changed police conduct, but they have discouraged citizen complaints about police. Other changes that could improve the use of cameras as a police-reform tool include constraining officers' discretion to record and better automated review of reams of stored data.

The groundswell for greater accountability in police shootings has barely caused a ripple in Hawaii, where the state’s Law Enforcement Officer Independent Review board has finished only one case in its first three years of existence and has suspended meetings during the pandemic. With one of its two citizen member slots vacant on an otherwise law-enforcement-heavy board, the panel fails a basic tenet of accountability by severely limiting public access to the cases it’s considering and its deliberations, says one critic.

Protests against alleged brutality and extrajudicial killings by Nigeria's Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) led to demands for judicial panels of inquiry to investigate the abuses and provide justice to victims. Of Nigeria's 36 states, 29 set up panels of inquiry, and seven of those submitted reports and recommendations. Some victims have been compensated for illegal arrests and beatings. While critics say these measures don't go far enough, they concede the reports and payments have provided at least some accountability.

A Colorado law enacted in 2016 requires law enforcement officers to disclose their past disciplinary records when seeking a new job at a different agency. By making such disclosures automatic, the law standardizes hiring practices statewide, protects past employers from liability for making the disclosures, and most importantly prevents rogue officers from hopping from one job to the next undetected. Maine has no such requirement., and so some of its agencies might unknowingly hire an officer with a record of misconduct.