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 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 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 and a professor of law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “This information can be used to understand the system and reform it.”
“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,” said Aditya Parameswaran, an associate professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences who led work on the database at BIDS. BIDS is part of the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.
Read the full announcement from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.