Seven years in the making, a searchable database of California law enforcement misconduct and use-of-force reports is now available to the public. The free database contains records from close to 12,000 cases and 700 police departments, shining a light into the practices of what has long been among the least transparent states in the country when it comes to officer misconduct.
The state-funded Police Records Access Project was created by the California Reporting Project, a team spearheaded by journalists and data scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. The database was jointly published August 4 by CalMatters, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.
In 2018 California passed the Right to Know Act, which made certain types of police records subject to disclosure via public records requests. Though groundbreaking, it was limited to misconduct cases involving shootings, sexual assault or dishonesty that interfered with investigations. In 2021 the state passed legislation that made additional types of records subject to disclosure, including those related to excessive force, unlawful searches and engaging in prejudice or discrimination. But now, the public can use the new database to search hundreds of departments across the state at once.
All records were originally released by law enforcement departments after being redacted to protect the release of personal information or graphic imagery. The database does not include audio or video records.
“Law enforcement hiring officials are very interested,” California Reporting Project Director of Research Lisa Pickoff-White told Filter. “They’ll be able to search records about officers in ways they have not been able to do before.”
Pickoff-White and colleagues began filing records requests January 1, 2019. Since then, they’ve collectively sent more than 3,500 requests, and published hundreds of stories based on the records they obtained.
“We always knew we wanted to publish the underlying documents as well, but that was really difficult,” she said. “Before [2019], some agencies actually started destroying records. We had to sue in other places to produce these records. Getting them has been a huge amount of work.”
If the agency does send the requested records, they might send them a few files at a time. The team organized tens of thousands of files for the public to be able to make sense of the cases they came from.
Statewide, many cases show inaction by police agencies to investigate deaths at the hands of one of their own.
“[There are many] people who would benefit from this,” Susan E. Seager, who worked on the database and also leads the Press Freedom Project at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, told Filter. “Family members of someone who was shot and killed or severely injured by a police officer, they can now look up the interview of the officer [to see] if they were disciplined … reporters can look up if an officer is involved in a shooting, they can see if they were involved in other shootings and what happened. Criminal defense lawyers and prosecutors can use this—they should know if that officer worked for another agency prior to where the prosecutor is using them as a witness, and see if they were fired for dishonesty.”
Statewide, many cases show inaction by police agencies to investigate deaths at the hands of one of their own.
KQED sued the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to compel release of records. The Chronicle uncovered a practice wherein officers who’d received misconduct complaints could sign an agreement to erase their record in exchange for their resigning—so they could go on working at a different department.
Pickoff-White and colleagues have sued the San Joaquin County coroner over costs of death investigations. And they uncovered records of 73 police dog bites in the city of Richmond, in which some of the victims were children. They’re now part of a push to include dog bites under the legal definition of great bodily injury.
“These are the kind of pushes we will continue to make,” she said. “[The work] is ongoing.”
Image (cropped) via City of Olympia, Washington
