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August 4th, 2025 at 4am
A searchable database of public records (approximately 1.5 million pages from nearly 700 law enforcement agencies) regarding the use of armed and fraudulent activities by California law enforcement officials is open to the public.
The Police Records Access Project, a database built by Berkeley, California and Stanford University, is published by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and Calmatters.
It greatly expands public access to interior records showing how law enforcement agencies across the state handle allegations and uses of police misconduct that result in death or serious injury. Currently, the database contains approximately 12,000 cases of records.
The database is the product of a long-standing work by an interdisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civic liberty advocates led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), the Berkeley Journalism Research Program (IRP), and Stanford University’s big local news. Other major contributors include the ACLU Foundation in Southern California, California, Innocence Coalition of California, and National ASSN. Criminal defense attorneys, UC Irvine Law School Press Freedom Project, and UC Berkeley Law School Criminal Law & Justice Center.
Police Record Access Project
Search California public records of law enforcement violence and misconduct.
The team collected, organized and reviewed millions of public records and built databases using new technologies such as generation AI. Financial support was provided by the State of California with additional funding from the Sony Foundation and ROC Nation.
All documents in the database were compiled in accordance with California’s public records laws and then released by law enforcement.
Work on the database began in 2018 when around 40 newsroom journalists formed a reporting project in California and began sharing documents obtained through record requests. In all, reporters sent more than 3,500 public record requests to police departments, district attorney’s offices and coroners throughout the state.
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