The Society of Professional Journalists is honoring the Police Records Access Project — a pioneering initiative by journalists and data scientists to make California’s police misconduct records available to and searchable by the public and press — with a 2026 Sunshine Award for advancing the principles of open government.
The Police Records Access Project is a searchable public database of law enforcement records documenting police use of force and misconduct, initiated by reporters in the California Reporting Project and advanced by UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, Stanford University’s Big Local News and UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science. The database was published and made accessible simultaneously in August 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and CalMatters.
Professor David Barstow. Photo: Wesaam Al-Badry (’20)
“The Police Records Access Project illustrates exactly why transparency in government is necessary,” said David Barstow, the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism at UC Berkeley Journalism. “The Investigative Reporting Program at Berkeley Journalism is proud to be part of a multidisciplinary team of journalists, lawyers and data scientists who not only fought to access these records but also took the extra step to make the information readily accessible to the public.”
Members of SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee hailed the Police Records Access Project as “an innovative and replicable resource” making over a million pages of records accessible to journalists and the public alike. In one year, the database has been searched more than one million times.
“Behind every step toward a more open and accountable government is someone willing to ask difficult questions, challenge unnecessary secrecy and keep the public’s right to know first,” said SPJ National President Chris R. Vaccaro, in the announcement.
“These honorees have strengthened open government through persistence, innovation and public service, and we appreciate the example they set for others.” SPJ FOIA Committee Chair Michael Morisy highlighted the “exceptional group” of Sunshine Award nominees and winners at a time of tightening access to information.
“The two winners stood out not only for their incredible accomplishments, but also in how they did this work collaboratively, building a stronger transparency field for everyone,” Morisy said. “Public records fights are often very long, lonely affairs, but today we recognize that these aren’t fights that need to be taken on alone.”
Creation of the database was made possible by a series of landmark laws adopted by the state of California to improve transparency around law enforcement. Through S.B. 1421, approved in 2018, and S.B. 16, approved in 2021, California made records related to some uses of force and misconduct accessible to the public for the first time. Police unions appealed to the California Supreme Court to block the laws and filed dozens of challenges in county courts, but ultimately failed.
Although records could be requested, the process of organizing documents from hundreds of agencies that provided different types of data and formatted documents differently from each other didn’t result in greater accessibility or transparency at first.
Still, journalists did the work.
Lisa Pickoff-White writing out early database schemas on September 10, 2019, at KQED in San Francisco.
In 2018, reporters from some 40 newsrooms formed the California Reporting Project and began using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request documents — such as investigative reports, interview transcripts, photographs and body-worn camera footage. Over several years, reporters and some 50 UC Berkeley Journalism students secured documents from hundreds of California law enforcement agencies, including police departments, sheriff’s departments, university and school police forces, the California Highway Patrol and other government entities.
The process was painstaking as requests had to be made agency by agency, with each group using a different reporting format with different data points, and then organized manually on spreadsheets. The nature of the process made it a challenge to find trends and patterns across the state.
California Reporting Project journalists gather at NICAR, IRE’s annual data journalism conference in Nashville with alum Lisa Pickoff-White, center, in 2023.
State funding spearheaded by then-State Senator Nancy Skinner enabled data scientists at UC Berkeley and Stanford to use AI and other tools to build a database that was accessible and searchable.
With the launch of the Police Records Access Project a year ago, some 1.5 million pages obtained from nearly 500 law enforcement agencies became searchable by the public for the first time. In the past year, five investigations have been published with information sourced from the database, including those with reporting by Berkeley Journalism students.
A law enforcement officer scrolls through messages on a mobile phone. An investigation by The California Newsroom and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program found that many California officers disciplined for biased conduct remained employed in law enforcement. (Anna Vignet/KQED)
For example, in an exclusive investigation for public media in June, the Investigative Reporting Program and The California Newsroom housed at KQED reported that nearly 150 police officers across California were caught using language and behaving in ways that show a clear bias against people based on their race, gender, sexuality, disability status and more — and most of them kept their jobs.
Their reporting uncovered officers who used racial slurs, shared derogatory memes and pictures and harassed members of the public and other police officers. This included officers joking about violence against Black people, an officer who called a judge the c-word in her courtroom, and an officer who was caught making violent threats against transgender people online under a pseudonym.
To discover germane cases, reporters searched the text of the files and AI-generated summaries of misconduct cases using slurs and terms such as “racist” and “prejudice” to identify cases for further review.
From top left: Lisa Pickoff-White (’09), Katey Rusch (’20), Marnette Federis (’09), Marquis Mahone-Chambers (’26), Elizabeth Santos (’25) and Julian Wray (’25).
Berkeley Journalism alums Lisa Pickoff-White (’09) and Marnette Federis (’09) worked with The California Newsroom’s Emily Zentner to examine records collected by the Project. Alums Katey Rusch (’20), the record requests manager and data journalist for the California Reporting Project at the Investigative Reporting Program, Elizabeth Santos (’25), Julian Wray (’25) and Marquis Mahone-Chambers (’26) contributed reporting to the KQED story.
“California law mandates that these records be public,” Rusch said, “but in reality, agencies still make you fight for them every step of the way. This database changes that. It puts critical information directly in the hands of the public—and more importantly, into the hands of the families whose loved ones have been harmed by police. Public records are a right, not a privilege for those who know how to navigate the system.”
Aaron McFarlane, a former Oakland PD officer once accused of lying, ended up working for the FBI, where he killed an associate of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Todd Trumbull/S.F. Chronicle.
Other stories that used the police data include a San Francisco Chronicle story by Rusch and Matthias Gafni: “An FBI agent killed a man after the Boston Marathon bombing. Oakland PD had helped hide his past,” a Guardian piece by Pickoff-White and Zentner about 22 people who died since 2016 after being held face down by police, and a KQED story by Sukey Lewis (’15) and Thomas Peele that exonerated a woman wrongly arrested for misusing 911.
