A searchable database of public records concerning use of force and misconduct by California law enforcement officers — some 1.5 million pages from nearly 700 law enforcement agencies — is now available to the public.
The Police Records Access Project, a database built by UC Berkeley and Stanford University, is being published by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and CalMatters.
It will vastly expand public access to internal affairs records that show how law enforcement agencies throughout the state handle misconduct allegations and uses of police force that result in death or serious injury. The database currently includes records from nearly 12,000 cases.
The database is the product of years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and Stanford University’s Big Local News. Other key contributors include the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, California Innocence Coalition, the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, UC Irvine law school’s Press Freedom Project and UC Berkeley law school’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.
The team collected, organized and vetted millions of public records, used emerging technologies such as generative AI to build the database. Financial support was provided by the State of California, with additional funding from the Sony Foundation and Roc Nation.
Every document in the database was released by a law enforcement agency after being redacted in compliance with California’s public records laws.
Work on the database began in 2018, when journalists in some 40 newsrooms formed the California Reporting Project and began sharing documents obtained through records requests. In all, reporters sent more than 3,500 public records requests to police departments, district attorney’s offices and coroners all across the state.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
