These people are among more than 4,500 who were seriously injured or killed by law enforcement officers in California from 2016 to 2024. Although local governments collect detailed reports about these uses of force, including the results of internal investigations and disciplinary actions, they don’t release this information in a systematic way to the public. 

But in 2018, California legislators passed a new law enabling people to request records about serious uses of force and misconduct by police. My goal is to unlock the information in these now-public records and transform it into data so people can easily look up information about a specific use of force, officer or agency.

I knew that agencies would not release the records without a coordinated request effort. I also knew that we needed to identify small jurisdictions to track officers working in places like welfare departments or rail stations. So I joined other reporters to form a collaboration requesting records from nearly 700 law enforcement and oversight agencies.

Since then, I’ve guided the collaboration’s technical decisions. We’ve tracked and stored more than 28TB of files to date. I took an initial 144 data points requested by reporters and transformed them into a data-entry system. This data has touched or supported more than 100 stories across California. That reporting has changed state law and people’s lives.

In 2023, we received state funding and expanded as the Police Records Project. Now situated at UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Stanford’s Big Local News, I work with a team of reporters, engineers, attorneys and academics to apply generative AI and machine learning to organize and classify our records. Our collaboration has identified about 12,000 use-of-force cases and more than 2,000 misconduct cases and provided the original records to the public.

On August 4, 2025, the Police Records Access Project published a first-of-its-kind database with the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, CalMatters and KQED, releasing about 1.5 million pages detailing police violence and misconduct.