Sponsor MessageBecome a KQED sponsor
upper waypoint
The California Report

Thousands Of California Police Records Now Publicly Available

Keith Mizuguchi
Save ArticleSave Article
Failed to save article

Please try again

(L-R) Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley, mother of Hadiya Pendleton; Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant; and Lezley McSpadden, mother of Mike Brown stand on stage prior to delivering remarks on the second day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 26, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Johnson says she talks regularly with other mothers who have lost loved ones to police violence.
(L-R) Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley, mother of Hadiya Pendleton; Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant; and Lezley McSpadden, mother of Mike Brown stand on stage prior to delivering remarks on the second day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 26, 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Johnson says she talks regularly with other mothers who have lost loved ones to police violence. (Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, August 4, 2025…

  • Monday is a milestone for police accountability in California. Anyone can now look up incidents of serious use of force and police misconduct in the state in a new free database. It makes once confidential records from about 12,000 cases gathered from the state’s nearly 700 law enforcement and oversight agencies publicly available. It was seven years in the making and brought together teams of journalists, data scientists, and advocates from across California. 
  • A federal appeals court has rejected efforts by the Trump administration to halt a temporary restraining order limiting some immigration-related stops and arrests in Southern California.

Thousands Of Once-Secret Police Records Are Now Public. Here’s How You Can Use Them

For the first time, you can look up serious use of force and police misconduct incidents in California. KQED, along with journalism and police accountability advocates, has published a database that houses thousands of once-confidential records gathered from the state’s nearly 700 law enforcement and oversight agencies.

The free database, which has been in the works for seven years and contains files for almost 12,000 cases, promises to give anyone — including attorneys, victims of police violence, journalists and law enforcement hiring officials — insight into police shootings and officers’ past behavior.

For decades, misconduct and use-of-force records for California law enforcement officers were among the most difficult to obtain. That began to change in 2018 with the passage of Senate Bill 1421, the “Right to Know” Act, which came about with the help of police accountability advocates. The law unsealed records for incidents in which officers fired a gun or used force resulting in serious injury or death, and for officers who were found to have been dishonest or committed sexual assault. In 2021, the passage of another bill expanded the law to include cases of officer discrimination, excessive force and wrongful arrests or searches.

But the new laws were just the beginning of the fight to pry open the black box of police accountability — which continues today. Agencies often slow-walk or refuse to provide records, and have even destroyed them. KQED and other outlets have sued multiple agencies, including the state attorney general, in order to force compliance. Faced with these obstacles — and the difficulty of navigating California’s disparate law enforcement agencies, including 58 sheriff’s departments, hundreds of police departments, transit authorities and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — KQED co-founded The California Reporting Project, a collaborative of more than 30 news outlets that agreed to pursue and share records.

Appeals Court Keeps Order Blocking Trump Administration From Indiscriminate Immigration Sweeps

A federal appeals court ruled Friday night to uphold a lower court’s temporary order blocking the Trump administration from conducting indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in Southern California.

Sponsored

A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing Monday afternoon at which the federal government asked the court to overturn a temporary restraining order issued July 12 by Judge Maame E. Frimpong, arguing it hindered their enforcement of immigration law. Immigrant advocacy groups filed suit last month accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of systematically targeting brown-skinned people in Southern California during the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The lawsuit included three detained immigrants and two U.S. citizens as plaintiffs.

In her order, Frimpong said there was a “mountain of evidence” that federal immigration enforcement tactics were violating the Constitution. She wrote the government cannot use factors such as apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a location such as a tow yard or car wash, or someone’s occupation as the only basis for reasonable suspicion to detain someone.

lower waypoint
next waypoint