California police kept jobs after bias investigations
Disciplinary records obtained through California Public Records Act requests showed that officers who used racist, sexist or homophobic slurs, mocked transgender people, made violent comments about Black people and displayed other explicitly biased behavior often kept their jobs and faced limited consequences, such as a letter of reprimand or training.
This story built on my work at the Police Records Access Project. With reporters Emily Zentner and Marnette Federis, I reviewed thousands of pages of internal affairs investigations, disciplinary records and court filings received from nearly 500 law enforcement and oversight agencies in the Golden State to examine how agencies handled such cases.
I built a system to search the text of the files and also leverage AI-generated summaries of misconduct cases using slurs and terms such as “racist” and “prejudice.” Then we reviewed the data to ascertain whether officers exhibited explicit bias against members of a protected group.
Additionally, I analyzed certification data and determined that many officers remain employed in law enforcement after agencies found that they had violated certain policies that prohibit prejudice against members of protected groups.
California’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission requested the list of officers after the story ran to determine if any officers should be decertified.