Kyla Bourne is developing a national database to scrutinize prosecutors' decisions in cases of police misconduct, particularly in fatal use-of-force incidents and in-custody deaths. This database is a crucial tool for stakeholders analyzing legal accountability and the frequency of criminal charges against officers in such cases. Bourne is scraping and coding thousands of prosecutorial memos, utilizing both qualitative coding and advanced machine learning algorithms for classification. This project not only aims to provide a comprehensive resource for legal analysis but also shows how evidence is used and interpreted to legally justify police killing. The use of large-language AI models for document analysis further highlights the role of technology in aggregating results of case-by-case decisions into population trends in adversarial legal documents.
