It’s quite democracy-affirming, if somewhat startling in its frankness, to open up the website for the brand new Police Records Access Project database for the state of California.
It’s the official record of misconduct by individual law enforcement officers in our state, and it’s a doozy.
“Search by officer name or keyword,” invites an empty box on your computer screen.
Then, to the right of that bubble: “Select counties or agencies.”
Once you’ve put in Officer Jones and selected My Hometown, you are invited to check any or all of three boxes to narrow your search: Misconduct, Force and Shooting.
The first will list any records “made when an agency determined an officer violated certain department rules.”
The second is “Records about when officers used force resulting in serious injury or death.”
The third: “Records about when officers fired a gun, even if they missed.”
Yes, you read that correctly: Californians have the right to know about any time a law enforcement officer in our state discharged his weapon, even if by accident; even if he has shot himself in the foot.
Having all your workplace mistakes available for all to see on a state-run database would certainly be disconcerting to most of us, a violation of our rights of privacy.
But putting on a badge and policing the rest of society’s conduct — with different degrees of violence, with arrest, if deemed necessary — puts officers in an entirely different workplace category than anyone else. Under the color of authority, they can suddenly change our lives, usually for the better and occasionally for the worse, and Californians need to be able to see what discipline has been meted out for misconduct by law enforcement.
The database “contains roughly 1.5 million pages of records from 12,000 officer-misconduct and use-of-force cases in California,” the nonprofit news site CalMatters reports. “The public can now search internal affairs documents and other police-misconduct records from nearly 700 California law enforcement agencies through a database created by UC Berkeley and Stanford University.”
The academics who created the database are doing the Lord’s work in furthering Californians’ right to know just who is policing our state. It’s the first of its kind in the whole nation, and we’ll hope that other states follow suit. Interestingly, it’s not just members of the public who will gain from having access to conduct information — police departments themselves, when searching for new officers to hire, will now be able to find out much more easily if an applicant has had problems while working elsewhere in the state.
“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,” Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project and a professor at Yeshiva University‘s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, told CalMatters. The database took seven years to produce, created by journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties groups working with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program and Stanford University’s Big Local News.
The project began after the Legislature approved laws aimed at improving law-enforcement transparency. Senate Bill 1421 of 2018 and SB 16 of 2021 granted public access to use-of-force and other misconduct records.
But previously those records could only be had by filing a specific request to an individual agency.
The database is a great win for police accountability in California. Bravo.
