Today, the Police Records Access Project, part of the CLEAN initiative at BIDS, became a publicly available database following years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and Stanford University’s Big Local News. Other key contributors include the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, California Innocence Organizations, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, UC Irvine law school’s Press Freedom Project and UC Berkeley law school’s Criminal Law & Justice Center.
"The release of this database demonstrates BIDS' commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration around the use of artificial intelligence to improve science and society,” said BIDS executive director, Kirstie Whitaker. “The BIDS-CLEAN project team leveraged artificial intelligence tools to scale the expertise of journalists while maintaining their collective ethical responsibilities to civic society."
The database – the first of its kind in the nation – will vastly expand public access to internal affairs records that disclose how law enforcement agencies throughout the state handle misconduct allegations as well as uses of police force that result in death or serious injury. The database, funded by the State of California, currently has records from nearly 12,000 cases, including thousands involving police shootings. Every record in the database was released by a law enforcement agency after being redacted in compliance with California’s public records laws. As a result, journalists and members of the public will now be able to search statewide for particular types of misconduct and use-of-force. Survivors of police violence will be able to look up disciplinary information about officers involved in their case. Police chiefs will be able to use the data to aid in hiring decisions. Researchers will be able to identify trends and patterns.
The team systematically collected, organized and vetted millions of public records, used emerging technologies such as generative AI to build the database, and created from scratch a searchable user-interface.
“Here we have an amazing example of how generative AI – with humans in the loop – can be used for good, at a scale that’s unprecedented, for a task that’s never been done before and for societal impact,” said Aditya Parameswaran, an associate professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences who led work on the database at BIDS. BIDS is part of the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.
Public access to the database can be found on these websites: CalMatters, KQED, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle
Read the full announcement from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.