A database available for public archives concerning the use of force and misconduct by agents of the Californian law application – some 1.5 million pages of nearly 700 law enforcement organizations – is now accessible to the public.
The police file access project, a database built by UC Berkeley and the University of Stanford, is published by Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kqed and Calmatters.
It will considerably expand public access to internal affairs files which show how the law enforcement organizations throughout the state manage the allegations and uses of the police forces which lead to death or serious injuries. The database currently includes recordings of nearly 12,000 cases.
The database is the product of years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and defenders of civil liberties, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), the Berkeley journalism program (IRP) and the major local news of the University of Stanford. The other key contributors include the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, California innocence Coalition, The National Assn. Criminal defense lawyers, the UC Irvine Law School’s Press Freedom project and the Berkeley Law School Criminal Law & Justice Center.
Police file access project
Look for the California public archives on the violence and misconduct of the police.
The team collected, organized and verified millions of public documents, used emerging technologies such as generative AI to build the database. Financial support was provided by the State of California, with additional funding from the Sony Foundation and the Roc Nation.
Each database document has been published by an law enforcement agency after having been expternal in accordance with the laws on California public files.
The work on the database began in 2018, when journalists in some 40 editorial rooms trained the California report project and began to share documents obtained through file requests. In total, journalists sent more than 3,500 requests for public files to the police services, the district prosecutor offices and the coroners throughout the state.