A new database on police use of force and misconduct in CA makes public 1.5 million pages of once-secret police records.

[usonian]

https://journalism.berkeley.edu/police-records-access/

links at the site.

Public records about use of force and misconduct by California law enforcement officers — some 1.5 million pages obtained from nearly 500 law enforcement agencies — will now be searchable by the public for the first time thanks to a new database built by UC Berkeley and Stanford University and published today by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and CalMatters.

links:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-04/clean-database-launch
https://clean.sfchronicle.com/
https://policerecords.kqed.org/
https://clean.calmatters.org/

The database — the first of its kind in the nation — will vastly expand public access to internal affairs records that disclose how law enforcement agencies throughout the state handle misconduct allegations as well as uses of police force that result in death or serious injury. The database, funded by the State of California, currently has records from nearly 12,000 cases, including thousands involving police shootings. Every record in the database was released by a law enforcement agency after being redacted in compliance with California’s public records laws. As a result, journalists and members of the public will now be able to search statewide for particular types of misconduct and use-of-force. Police chiefs will be able to use the data to aid in hiring decisions. Researchers will be able to identify trends and patterns.

...

The database, called the Police Records Access Project, is the product of years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP), the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and Stanford University’s Big Local News. Other key contributors include the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, California innocence organizations, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, UC Irvine law school’s Press Freedom Project and UC Berkeley law school’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.

...

“The creation of a public facing database is critical for all of the stakeholders in the criminal legal system: whether public defenders, innocence organizations, prosecutors, police departments or academics,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder and special counsel to the Innocence Project. “This information can be used to understand the system and reform it.”

Creation of the database was made possible by a series of landmark laws adopted recently by the state of California to improve transparency around law enforcement. (1) ... However, requesting these documents through the Public Records Act required going agency by agency, a laborious process that has made it impossible until now to identify trends and patterns across the state. It's coordinated and easier now.

“For 40 years California hid police misconduct,’’ said former state Sen. Nancy Skinner.


For more info:
The California Reporting Project
https://projects.scpr.org/california-reporting-project/

(1) S.B. 1421, approved in 2018, and S.B. 16, approved in 2021

It's nice to see Cal Berkeley and Stanford cooperate!

[multigraincracker]

1. We need a national data base.