When State Representative Russell Holmes recently described the kind of policing he wanted to see inMassachusetts, he envisioned a day when anyone stopped on the street or pulled over on the road could look at a badge number, enter it into a cellphone, and come up with an officer’s job history, including any complaints lodged.

For all its merits — and they are indeed many — the just-passed Senate police reform bill doesn’t really do that yet. But with a few small adjustments, it certainly could.

The former head of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus, Holmes and fellow caucus members were supportive of a police accreditation proposal filed by Governor Charlie Baker and now largely incorporated into the wide-ranging Senate effort. Holmes has spent years fighting to increase police accountability.

“I am sick and tired of hearing constituents say, ‘I asked for a badge number, and I didn’t get it,’ ’’ Holmes said at Baker’s news conference. “Those days are over.’’

It would be nice to think so. But there are some stumbling blocks to Holmes’s vision — gaps pointed out in testimony filed Friday with the House by the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association and lawyers representing The Boston Globe.

So, yes, this is something of a special pleading by those of us in the media who have attempted to shine a light on police abuses. Like Holmes and his constituents, journalists too are hampered by a lack of transparency on anything labeled “police personnel’’ issues, and that in turn makes it harder to inform the public and for sunshine to be a disinfectant of bad behavior. Bad cops have been able to take refuge behind that smokescreen for years. Making certain those days are over is central to the success of the reforms embodied in what the Senate bill calls the Police Officer Standards and Accreditation Committee (POSAC).

If the bill becomes state law, the independent committee will become a repository for complaints from both internal police department investigations and those made directly to POSAC by private citizens. That would indeed be the kind of trailblazing development Holmes envisioned. In the current version of the bill, however, it’s not the filing of complaints or their aggregation that would be available to the public but rather only records of sustained complaints, and even then the names of the officers would remain secret.

Senator William Brownsberger, who helped guide the Senate bill to passage, told the Globe editorial board that other police departments would have access to all pending complaints so as to prevent officers with problematic records from jumping from one community to another. But that leaves the public — and, yes, the press — on the outside.

“Police departments routinely dismiss misconduct complaints that they deem insufficiently supported,’’ according to testimony submitted to Beacon Hill by the MNPA and the Globe. “A police department’s decision to dismiss police misconduct complaints is itself a matter of public interest that warrants public oversight and accountability. The public also has a right to know whether particular officers have a history of complaints against them.’’

All complaints of misconduct should be a matter of public record. And that database should also be downloadable so its contents can be analyzed, sorted, and easily searchable.

Incident reports collected by the committee should include the discipline that was imposed, say, at the local level that might be short of decertification, or whether the complaint was deemed unfounded and the officer exonerated.

The media group is also asking that reports be kept for at least 40 years, and there’s certainly enough recent history to demonstrate that the routine destruction of police personnel records after just a few years has not served the public well. The State Police scandal is a monument to that. Finally, as the group notes, “A right of access to information is worth little without an enforcement mechanism.’’ The public — and, yes, the press — should be able to go to court so as to ensure compliance with transparency requirements.

So much of what is contained in the police reform bill is aimed directly at better policing, at restoring trust with a public that has seen too many tragic deaths that are the result of bad policing by officers who should have been deprived of their badges years earlier.

It is a good bill, but it could be a better one if it also restored public trust and advanced accountability by making police officer personnel records public. That’s the task ahead for the House.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.