New Database Exposes 12,000 Police Shootings and Misconduct Cases in California

A new tool is exposing the violent machinery of policing in California. The Police Records Access Project, a massive searchable database of more than 1.5 million pages from nearly 700 agencies, has gone live through a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and major news outlets including the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. At its core, this archive lifts the veil on the inner workings of a system that routinely shields itself from accountability.

The database currently holds nearly 12,000 cases, including internal affairs files on “misconduct allegations and uses of police force that result in death or serious injury.” Every page was originally released by agencies only after heavy redactions under California’s public records laws, which demonstrates the extent to which secrecy remains the default. Still, the fact that these documents are now searchable represents, as organizers put it, “years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates.”

This work began in 2018, when the California Reporting Project formed to demand transparency through more than 3,500 public records requests. The collective labor of reporters, lawyers, and community groups shows what happens when people refuse to let police violence be hidden. As one description of the project explains, the aim was to gather “millions of public records” and use tools like generative AI to organize them for public scrutiny.

The database is both a revelation and a reminder. On one hand, it provides families, organizers, and communities with evidence of brutality that police departments work hard to bury. On the other, it highlights the futility of reforms based on transparency alone. The documents reveal patterns of harm that are not the result of bad apples but of a system designed to protect itself. Even when misconduct is documented, police are rarely held accountable in ways that end the violence.

As the project’s supporters stress, “public access” is a step—but not the solution. The long history of concealment shows why abolitionists argue that true safety will not come from databases or redactions, but from dismantling the conditions that allow police violence to flourish in the first place.

Link: LA Times

Link to The Police Records Access Project: https://clean.latimes.com/?_gl=1*emkz9a*_gcl_au*NDE4NDA0MjQ0LjE3NTY4NTI1MDY.