California’s $7 Million Police Transparency Website Missing Cases Post 2024
A police transparency project based out of the University of California Berkeley started off strong but has since fizzled out as law enforcement fights the release of records.
A multi-million-dollar police transparency website funded by California taxpayers has not added any entries from the past two years, as the project director says agencies are not being forthcoming with records.
The Police Records Access Project, which is affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, launched in August 2025 with $6.87 million from the state. The website started “with roughly 1.5 million pages of internal law enforcement records from 1965 to 2024,” according to The Center Square.
The latest entry on the website is from Sep. 13, 2024. The database contains records on police shootings, use of force, and misconduct.
But arguably, the reason a police transparency website is needed in the first place has also been part of its undoing.
The Center Square reports:
In 2023, UC Berkeley referred to the website as a way to bridge an “information gap getting in the way of protecting people.” But years later, the information gap still exists. The database’s most recent case is from September 2024. The latest published case of “misconduct” is from January 2024. In total, there have only been three cases published from the past two years and zero cases from 2025 or 2026.
Director Lisa Pickoff-White says the project must constantly fight police agencies for records, and even when they are turned over, the formats can be laborious to convert.
“Sometimes we get physical records. We get thumb drives. We get hard drives,” she told Center Square.
“I’ve gotten a CD. I’ve gotten a CD with a staple through the cover of it which broke the CD. We’ve gotten paper,” Pickoff-White continued. “There’s a reporter whose garage is full of boxes.”
“It’s not the fault of Berkeley. It’s the fault of the governor, and the state, and the power of the police agencies,” Susan Seager said.
“What is the bottleneck? I don’t know,” she told Center Square. “A combination of ignorance, obstructionism, lack of will, lack of (people), arrogance. I think there’s a whole lot of things going on.”
In response to questions from Center Square, the governor’s media team stated: “The Governor believes accountability and transparency are foundational to public safety and community trust.”
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I had to read that title three times to come close to understanding what the article is about.
“Sometimes we get physical records. We get thumb drives. We get hard drives,” she told Center Square.
“I’ve gotten a CD. I’ve gotten a CD with a staple through the cover of it which broke the CD. We’ve gotten paper,” Pickoff-White continued. “There’s a reporter whose garage is full of boxes.”
They’re mad they’re getting paper? And hard drives and thumb drives? And CDs?Umm. What did they expect? What format did they want? Do they expect police departments to spend the huge amount of money it would take to digitize their records just for this project? Apparently they’ll complain even if they get digital records.
Also this article provides pretty much no information. They have to battle police departments? How? There’s no mention of anything regarding what seems to be the central premise of the article.
Bad government The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is spending money on
California is completely dysfunctional.
So sad their “lynch a cop” program is being sandbagged by the people they are targeting.
The director of this taxpayer funded group whines and tries to justify his group’s inaction because the police agencies stonewall them? WTF did he expect would happen? The whole point of their mission is to provide transparency, right? If the po-po was already being ‘transparent’ then why would his group even exist?
Load the records and notate the lack of transparency. The act of calling them out will probably break a lot of records loose. In either case, you would be doing your job, at least partially. As it stands, you look like just another Dim grifter.
as long as the money keeps flowing the actual work is secondary
ask all those “501/3 “churches”
Oh no, how are we going to vilify the cops if we can’t get all the records to skew in our reporting?
Nah, man the better framing is how will the general public/ordinary taxpayers who fund the PD know which individual LEO are bad apples? Attempts to avoid transparency and disclosure undermines the reality that the vast, overwhelming majority of LEO are solid professionals. There ARE bad Cops, not huge numbers, but they do exist and the public should know about them. Especially data on LEO who resigned from one Agency under a cloud to be hired at another, much less credibly accused/adjudicated to have committed acts which are serious enough to place them on the Brady list.
Is there ANYone at UC Berkeley who is a trustworthy, credible source?
A “police transparency website” that depends on police to submit data.
We’ve finally found a publication even shorter than “[Ethnic] War Heroes.”
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