DOJ Civil Rights Citizen Complaint Portal

18F and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice are engaging in an 8 week path analysis (research) and a 9 month explore and iterate (build) to improve the experience of filing civil rights complaints.

Project Background

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice works to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans and enforces federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, disability, religion, familial status, and national origin. Currently, when citizens believe a civil rights violation has taken place, they can submit a complaint to the Civil Rights Division in a variety of ways including phone, email or website.

The current complaint submission process and its accompanying website is not intuitive or user friendly. This leads to confusion for those who want to use it to file complaints. This also leads to time-consuming, manual effort by the internal DOJ staff involved in processing claims. On the citizen side, there is no unified or clear method for finding information and submitting claims to DOJ. On the DOJ intake side, there are many manual, disparate processes for routing and addressing the claims, making the review and decision process labor-intensive and inefficient. Data related to these complaints could produce value for the Civil Rights Division, but isn't currently being collected or analyzed.

The goals for this engagement are to:

• Improve the citizen experience for those who are trying to connect with the Civil Rights Division (i.e., people who believe they have experienced discrimination, advocacy groups, legal organizations);
• Streamline the intake process so that the Civil Rights Division can reduce load/demand on internal staff;
• Leverage the intake process so that the Civil Rights Division can gain data-driven insights to improve its organizational decision-making.

18F Team

• Aviva Oskow, Design, @avivaOskow
• Jacklynn Pham, Design, @jacklynn
• Nikki Zeichner, Strategy + co-lead, @nikzei
• Olesya Minina, Engagement Manager, @ominina
• Rebecca Refoy-Sidibe, Acquisition, @rrefoy
• Uchenna Moka-Solana, Product + co-lead, @uchmok

DOJ, Civil Rights Division Partners

• Product Owner: Daniel Yi, Senior Counsel for Innovation
• Project Sponsor: Kathy Toomey, Director of Operations

Path Analysis (Research) Timeline

During this research-focused phase, 18F will provide the Civil Rights Division with the following:

• Clear problem definition via a collaboratively evolved problem statement;
• A prioritized roadmap of the actions DOJ should take next to address this problem. The prioritization of this roadmap should take into account the organizational priorities, potential impact, and feasibility of the recommendations;
• When appropriate, limited prototypes or wireframes. Prototypes created during this phase will not be user validated, instead illustrating where the next phase of work can focus, what might make sense to test with users, and what sort of outcome user tests should drive towards.

Experiment + Iterate (Building) Timeline

TBA

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING for additional information.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.