Last Updated: 2023-07-06
This is a mirror of the document libraries of the King County Inquest Program, a mandatory civil inquiry into every police killing in King County, Washington. It is done manually, occasionally.
The documents are technically "published" "online" [sic] at the link above, but the county has made it as a practical matter impossible to access. They are using some bizzare niche storage tooling from a proprietary vendor in the year 2023. We've had things like FTP or direct HTTP access of PDF files for at least 25 years now, so it appears to be a clumsy attempt to obfuscate and hide. These are newsworthy matters and documents of potentially wide public interest, so they should be available on the open Web.
For the overly curious and inordinately motivated, to get the documents from the horse's mouth you'll need to find a MSFT tool called Azure Storate Explorer and the URL-ish identifier: https://desinquestpublicdocs.blob.core.windows.net/inquest-public
Version below as of: 2023-03-26
Sometime between 2023-03-26 and 2023-07-06, King County changed the schema for how they stored/exposed these documents. Also, because of the hostility to interoperability of Microsoft, the creation/modification dates of the individual files are useless. Nonetheless, as an archive, the old scheme is reproduced below:
These should not change. ./complete/
These are snapshotted as of the date above. ./active/