A new database on police use of force and misconduct in California

For Immediate Release
August 4, 2025 Contact: [email protected]

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

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.

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 team systematically collected, organized and vetted millions of public records, used emerging technologies such as generative AI to build the database, and created from scratch a searchable user-interface. 

“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.”

Aditya Parameswaran, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, led work on the database at BIDS. “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.

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. Through S.B. 1421, approved in 2018, and S.B. 16, approved in 2021, California made records related to uses of force and misconduct accessible to the public for the first time. 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.

“For 40 years California hid police misconduct,’’ said former state Sen. Nancy Skinner, who helped lead the legislative push for the new transparency laws and played a key role in securing state funding to create the database. “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.’’ 

Tiffany Bailey, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, which will contribute an additional 200,000 records to the database from its own efforts to obtain police records under S.B. 1421, said the Police Records Access Project will be a “vital tool’’ in holding law enforcement agencies accountable. “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,” Bailey said.

The database released today can now be accessed online via KQED, The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and CalMatters. The database does not include audio recordings or videos, and additional steps were taken to redact or remove graphic imagery along with personal information about sexual assault or domestic violence victims.

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. Early funding to support this work was provided by the Sony Foundation and Roc Nation. In all, reporters sent more than 3,500 public records requests to nearly 700 police departments, district attorney offices, sheriff’s offices, oversight agencies, probation, corrections and coroners all across the state. “The idea was to collaborate among organizations to build up this system, to make it easy to access these public records,’’ said Cheryl Phillips, founder of Stanford’s Big Local News, which specializes in helping local newsrooms incorporate data into their reporting.

The California Reporting Project has produced more than 100 stories to date from these records. Leading contributors to the California Reporting Project include the Bay Area News Group/Southern California News Group, CapRadio, KPCC/LAist and the newsrooms publishing the database today. Additional newsrooms are expected to publish the database as part of a broader rollout effort, and new features and tools will be added to the database as they are developed by the Police Records Access Project.

“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.

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For more information about the Police Records Access Project, please contact David Barstow, Investigative Reporting Program chair, through Andrea Lampros, UC Berkeley Journalism’s communications director: 510.847.4469, [email protected] or [email protected].