The California Reporting Project
The California Reporting Project
The California Reporting Project, a newsgathering collaboration, has worked to request and analyze records from law enforcement agencies to report on use of force and misconduct cases around the state, with a focus toward community-engaged and impactful journalism.
Lawmakers passed the landmark "Right to Know Act" in 2018, chipping away at a four-decade wall of secrecy concerning police internal investigations and officer discipline in California. SB 1421 makes public three categories of records:
Years after this law took effect, some records have been made public; many others have not.
SB 16 builds on the landmark law, expanding the categories of records to also include:
Now, you can search those records on the Police Records Access Project. As more records are obtained through public records requests, they will be added to the searchable database.
Six founding organizations joined together to seek the transparency that SB 1421 promised:
The California Reporting Project now includes dozens of organizations: from daily newspapers to public radio stations, nonprofit news groups to college journalism programs. Together these organizations have opened thousands of public records requests with law enforcement agencies and their overseers in California.
In 2021, Big Local News at Stanford University centralized the requests and records. In 2023, the project expanded again with new funding to the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science, Big Local News, and other partners to publish a comprehensive, statewide database of police misconduct and use-of-force records. Today, CRP is managed by the Investigative Reporting Program, Big Local News and the Institute for Data Science.
Even before SB 1421 took effect, police unions appealed to the California Supreme Court for extraordinary relief to block it. When that didn’t work, police unions filed dozens of challenges in county courts. Members of the California Reporting Project have fought for transparency in court:
CRP members have produced hundreds of original SB 1421 stories, both about police misconduct files and the fight to access them.
Some recent examples: