CA Makes 1.5M Police Misconduct Pages Searchable In Statewide Database

Millions of California's internal police records have become easily accessible to the public thanks to a first-of-its-kind database built by two universities.

The Police Records Access Project database, put together by a coalition of data scientists, civil rights advocates and journalists, now allows the public to search some 1.5 million pages containing misconduct records from nearly 700 California law enforcement agencies, UC Berkeley announced Monday.

“Making police misconduct records more transparent, searchable, and accessible to the public is a monumental leap for accountability,” said Lisa Wayne, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The database was built by UC Berkeley and Stanford University and was published on Monday by several news outlets, including CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times.

The database is not only meant to provide the public with access to information about serious uses of force, but agencies can also use such records to inform policies and hiring practices.

“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.”

The database allows anyone to search by name, agency or keyword. It will be updated as more files are released. But until now, such records were only accessible by filing a specific request to individual agencies, according to the news outlets that published the database on Monday.

The database was also made possible with generative AI, according to Aditya Parameswaran, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

“Here we have an amazing example of how generative AI — with humans in the loop — can be used for good, at a scale that’s unprecedented, for a task that’s never been done before and for societal impact,” he said.

What's more, the database was brought over the finish line after a series of landmark laws recently passed in California aimed at increasing law enforcement transparency. Senate Bill 1421, enacted in 2018, and Senate Bill 16, enacted in 2021, opened public access to records related to police use of force and misconduct for the first time. However, obtaining these records required filing Public Records Act requests with individual agencies—a time-consuming process that had previously prevented any statewide analysis of trends or patterns.

“For 40 years California hid police misconduct,’’ said former state Sen. Nancy Skinner, who helped lead the legislative push for the transparency laws. “We were able to open those records to the public when the legislature passed S.B. 1421 in 2019. Now with this new database, Californians will have even better access, making it easier to find out which law enforcement officers have a history of bad behavior and which of our police departments do the right thing to hold their officers accountable.’’

Over seven years, several other key contributors worked on bringing the database to life, including 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.

“This living database makes the transparency and accountability aims of SB 1421 a reality,” said Tiffany Bailey, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “Critically, families who have lost loved ones in California will now have direct access to the information they need to seek meaningful accountability that has too often been denied.”

The ACLU is contributing an additional 200,000 records to the database from its own efforts to obtain public records.

The database, released Monday, can now be found online via KQED, The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and CalMatters. See the database here.