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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