It’s not unusual for a news article to end with some reference to why we’ll never know the rest of the story. Colleges facing scandal often end media inquiries by stating that they “don’t comment on personnel matters,” even though they are publicly funded institutions. Even local governments often shut down questions by pulling the “personnel matters” card. But one place this rule doesn’t seem to apply is your local law enforcement agency.
Police reform efforts continue to make law enforcement files more accessible to the public. In many states, citizens can even obtain internal affairs investigation files. The state of California, though, is the first to create an actual database for this purpose.
In 2018, California became one of the aforementioned states granting public access to police records. Senate Bill 1421 (and SB 16, in 2021) codified the requirement for local law enforcement agencies to allow citizens to obtain use-of-force and other misconduct records. To do so, citizens would file a specific request to the agency that they wanted to obtain the information from.
Recently, a publicly available database was created by UC Berkeley and Stanford University to house this information in one place. A group of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates — including organizations such as the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the California Innocence Coalition and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers — worked for seven years to compile records from nearly 700 agencies.
The Police Records Access Project database can be used by law enforcement agencies during their hiring process, hopefully allowing them to better vet potential candidates. Such a one-stop shop obviously improves transparency, making it easier for citizens to obtain information about their local law enforcement agencies, as well as helping researchers to study law enforcement trends. It currently contains approximately 1.5 million pages of records from 12,000 officer-misconduct and use of force cases.
Despite the potential benefits of such a database for transparency, it’s hard not to notice that many of the involved organizations aren’t exactly known for appreciating the law enforcement profession.
Tiffany Bailey, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, told CalMatters that the organization will contribute an additional 200,000 records to the database. These were gathered through their own efforts to obtain public records. She went on to say, “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.” Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, also expressed that the database could be used as a tool by public defenders, innocence organizations and prosecutors as well as police departments.
The documents in the database have been redacted in compliance with California’s public records laws and do not include crime scene photographs, audio recordings or videos. Personal information about sexual assault and domestic violence victims has also been redacted.
Much of the funding for the project came from the state of California, with additional funds from the Sony Foundation and Roc Nation.
