The California Reporting Project
A Bakersfield police officer beat a man with a baton until his arm broke. A police dog in San Jose bit a toddler while an officer arrested a sobbing teenager and her mother. San Diego police shot and killed a 21-year-old refugee from Myanmar with mental illness.
Since 2018, California Reporting Project members have requested records about uses of force resulting in serious injury and sustained findings of misconduct from hundreds of law enforcement agencies, district attorneys and oversight agencies throughout the Golden State.
I'm working to systemize those requests, and automate extracting information.
I've helped develop questions and an application for two researchers to answer a limited set of questions about each case, then the system flags discrepancies for editors, who also link named officers to state staffing data so we can track where officers worked.
Through this process we've examined how often Bakersfield police officers seriously injured people with mental illness or who were intoxicated. We've found Richmond police officers were more likely to deploy dogs to bite people.
