Topline:
For the first time, you can look up serious use of force and police misconduct incidents in California.
Why now: LAist, KQED and other California newsrooms, together with police accountability advocates, have published a database that houses thousands of once-confidential records gathered from the state’s nearly 700 law enforcement and oversight agencies.
Keep reading... for details on what's available and how to use it.
For the first time, you can look up serious use of force and police misconduct incidents in California.
LAist, KQED and other California newsrooms, together with police accountability advocates, have published a database that houses thousands of once-confidential records gathered from the state’s nearly 700 law enforcement and oversight agencies.
The free database, first published last week, has been in the works for seven years. It contains files for almost 12,000 cases, promises to give anyone — including attorneys, victims of police violence, journalists and law enforcement hiring officials — insight into police shootings and officers’ past behavior. LAist is making if available to readers on on website now.
Cephus Johnson, whose nephew Oscar Grant was fatally shot in the back by a BART police officer in Oakland in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2009, knows firsthand just how important this database will be to other families who’ve lost people to police violence.
“ For impacted families, the first question is: ‘What happened?’” he said.
They can now find details of what happened to their loved ones and how the police investigated it — or what they overlooked — without having to deal with the often frustrating process of trying to obtain the records themselves.
Getting those answers, Johnson said, “is the beginning of part of the healing process.”
Click here to search the database.
For decades, misconduct and use-of-force records for California law enforcement officers were among the most difficult to obtain. That began to change in 2018 with the passage of Senate Bill 1421, the “Right to Know” Act, which came about with the help of Johnson and other police accountability advocates.
The law unsealed records for incidents in which officers fired a gun or used force resulting in serious injury or death, and for officers who were found to have been dishonest or committed sexual assault. In 2021, the passage of another bill expanded the law to include cases of officer discrimination, excessive force and wrongful arrests or searches.
But the new laws were just the beginning of the fight to pry open the black box of police accountability — which continues today. Agencies often slow-walk or refuse to provide records, and have even destroyed them. LAist, KQED and other outlets have sued multiple agencies, including the state attorney general, in order to force compliance.
Faced with these obstacles — and the difficulty of navigating California’s disparate law enforcement agencies, including 58 sheriff’s departments, hundreds of police departments, transit authorities and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation — LAist co-founded The California Reporting Project, a collaborative of more than 30 news outlets which is now led by Big Local News at Stanford University, the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program and the Berkeley Institute of Data Science.
“We knew from the start that this information needed to be available to the public,” KQED Editor-in-Chief Ethan Toven-Lindsey said. “Police misconduct records shouldn’t be locked away in filing cabinets where only a few people can see them.”
Eventually, The California Reporting Project joined forces with the Police Records Access Project, a transparency coalition which includes the ACLU, the Innocence Project, Stanford and UC Berkeley. In 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $6.7 million for the effort.
Jumana Musa, director of the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), said her organization joined the collaborative because justice requires transparency.
“This information gets hidden, it gets buried, it is not accessible,” she said. While Musa will use the database to help defend her clients, she said there’s an even more acute need for law enforcement agencies get familiar with the tool: “to ensure that you’re not gonna hire people and give them a weapon and give them a badge when that person has been known to be problematic [or] dangerous.”
The California Police Chiefs Association did not respond to request for comment.
The nearly 12,000 cases make up about 1.5 million pages at the time of publication — but there are several ways to search and use the database.
Three categories divide the cases: use of force, shootings and misconduct. There is a range of document types, from investigative reports to interview transcripts and incident summaries.
There is no cost for using the tool, and you won’t be asked to provide any information to search these records.
Lisa Pickoff-White, co-founder and research director of The California Reporting Project, said it’s helpful to take some time to understand the kinds of cases and records in the database before drawing any conclusions.
You can do keyword searches, filter your search by date or the agency that provided the records — for example, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, the Los Angeles Police Department.
Pickoff-White suggests starting simply. “Search for things like ‘taser’ or ‘canine.’ Or search for an officer’s name. Then review the records to see if you’ve found cases where they used force or violated policy.” But remember: just because an officer’s name is in the database, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were involved in misconduct or use of force.
The “About” page explains the type of records, methodology and the limitations of the database. If you find information in the database that you don’t think should be public, you can also submit a request to remove it.
Keep in mind this database is a living thing and is far from complete — the people maintaining it are adding new records as they receive them.
Victims of police violence and their families
The records in the database, Cephus Johnson said, can give families like his who have experienced police violence a clearer picture of what took place, and help them “determine how they will get justice for their loved one.”
But Johnson advises families to use the tool with a great deal of care because sometimes the records can contain examples of callous police behavior, negligence or descriptions of graphic injuries.
“On top of the mourning, you’re angry, you got many emotions that you gotta really deal with,” he said.
Johnson suggests that certain family members — say, the grieving mother of someone killed by police — might be better served if a relative or friend reviews the records.
“There’s got to be some caretaking,” he said, “because we know sometimes you’re gonna hear things that you just can’t believe these officers would do.”
“This kind of data is necessary for even basic forms of independent oversight,” said Tarak Shah, a data scientist who helped manage the Police Records Access Project.
Shah said he’s excited about the database’s potential to contribute to criminal justice research. He’s spoken to researchers interested in how police killings get classified by independent medical examiners vs. coroners, who are under the purview of the local sheriff.
“As a researcher, you might have questions about whether it’s possible to do unbiased investigations in those scenarios,” he said. Those cause-of-death determinations can mean the difference between a criminal investigation of a law enforcement officer and a death essentially going unexamined.
Other research areas could include the intersection of mental health and law enforcement, the role drug and alcohol impairment can play in some police encounters and a better understanding of what consequences officers face for misconduct — ranging from casual misogyny and racism to excessive force.
Shah said the depth and complexity of the investigative files have been both the “strength and the main challenge of this project.” The database contains incredibly granular information about officer behaviors and key incidents, but the records are not neatly organized into structured data like you might see in a spreadsheet.
He said the database would not be possible without the latest advancements in AI and large language models, which they used to help categorize and sort the records, and to identify and redact sensitive information.
Police officers’ credibility is fundamental to the criminal justice system; when officers take the stand, their word often determines the outcome of a case. Attorneys can now look up officers who’ve been dishonest or biased — key information for juries assessing the truth of their testimony.
“To me, the primary use is to impeach officers on the stand or to be able to properly defend the client, with full knowledge of who it [is] they’re dealing with,” said Musa, the attorney with NACDL.
In 2019, in one of the first cases unsealed by the new transparency law, KQED uncovered the story of a Rio Vista police officer who had lied on official documents. As a result, the Solano County District Attorney dropped criminal charges against a woman who a police dog had mauled.
Civil rights attorneys who often look for evidence of patterns and practices within departments to substantiate their clients’ claims could also find useful information in the database.
“The one thing that moves the needle when it comes to getting accountability in the criminal legal system is investigative journalism,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project. “If you can expose people that are systematically breaking the law or not playing by the rules or harming people they should be protecting — when you get those stories, that’s when things change.”
An LAist investigation last year reported that nearly a third of LAPD shootings since 2017 involved a person in a mental health crisis, despite years of promises that the department was working to deescalate those encounters.
Around the state, members of the collaborative:
Taken together, press coverage has helped move the needle on police reform in California. In 2020, state lawmakers passed a law requiring the state attorney general to investigate all police shootings in which the subject was not armed.
In 2022, they passed a police decertification law, putting in place a mechanism to strip officers who’ve committed egregious misconduct of their badges. This year, the Legislature is considering a number of additional transparency and oversight measures.
We want to hear who you are, how you’re using this database and why. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your work and what brought you to the database.
Topline:
Throne, the smart restroom company at dozens of Metro stations, reached a milestone of 1 million uses last week, the company said.
Why it matters: Metro has partnered with Throne to provide public restrooms since 2023 starting with mobile toilets at three public stations. Now, the restrooms are at 64 locations.
The backstory: Before their pilot program in 2023, Metro had just a few publicly accessible restrooms across their coverage area.
Throne, the smart restroom company at dozens of Los Angeles Metro stations, reached a milestone of 1 million uses last week, the company said.
Metro has partnered with Throne to provide public restrooms since 2023, starting with high-tech toilets at three public stations.
In advance of the World Cup, Metro and Throne wanted to expand their presence in Los Angeles. The company completed those installations on June 4, days ahead of L.A.'s first World Cup match on June 12. Now, 64 locations are operating across the Metro system, according to Throne.
Before the partnership, Metro had just a few publicly accessible restrooms across its coverage area.
In a social post marking the occasion, Throne wrote, “Here’s to the next million.”
Topline:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., died late Saturday night following a "brief and sudden illness," according to a statement released by his office. He was 71.
Why it matters: Graham served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, when he succeeded Strom Thurmond in the Senate. He was reelected three times and recently won a primary election as he sought a fifth term.
Details: His office did not immediately reply to a request for information on his cause of death.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., died late Saturday night following a "brief and sudden illness," according to a statement released by his office. He was 71.
His office did not immediately reply to a request for information on his cause of death.
Graham served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, when he succeeded Strom Thurmond in the Senate. He was reelected three times and recently won a primary election as he sought a fifth term.
Graham served in the U.S. military for more than three decades. After graduating from the University of South Carolina's law school, he served as an active duty Air Force lawyer for six years. Graham later served in both the South Carolina Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves and retired from the military in 2015 at the rank of colonel.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune called Graham "a strong advocate for the United States and a strong ally to freedom-loving countries across the globe," in a statement posted on X. "Lindsey fought passionately for the Palmetto State. He was a trusted adviser and colleague to me and many others, and numerous presidents and heads of state have relied on his counsel."
President Trump shared a remembrance on his Truth Social platform: "Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot."
His death comes at a difficult moment for the Senate Republican conference, which has struggled with a narrow majority that includes a handful of outgoing members who occasionally break ranks to oppose the president.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has missed votes during an apparently ongoing hospitalization for an undisclosed health issue, further narrowing the margins for Thune to pass legislation and confirm executive and judicial branch nominees.
During his near-quarter century in the Senate, Graham served as chair of two key committees and was instrumental in enacting Trump's policy and staffing priorities.
As chair of the Judiciary Committee during much of Trump's first term, Graham oversaw the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and of scores of federal judges.
Last year as head of the budget committee, Graham shepherded the president's landmark tax package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to passage despite unanimous Democratic opposition and thorny negotiations with his Republican colleagues.
An adaptable and sometimes controversial deal-maker, Graham was the last surviving member of an influential group of Senate defense hawks known as "the three amigos," alongside the late Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat-turned-Independent. The group was a fixture of congressional delegations to conflict zones.
Graham was among the most vocal supporters of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran.
"Israel has lost one of its greatest friends. America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement posted to X. "Our hearts are with Lindsey's family and with the American people at this difficult time."
Graham also sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and staked a lane as a fierce critic of Donald Trump. In a 2015 CNN interview, Graham referred to then-candidate Trump as "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" who doesn't represent the views of the Republican Party.
In the decade since Trump's victory, though, Graham has become one of the president's staunchest advocates. A longtime friend and ally of McCain, Graham attributed his transformation to a sense of patriotic duty.
"I am not going to give up on the idea of working with this president. The best way I can honor John McCain is help my country," he told CBS News in 2018.
A frequent Trump golf companion, Graham hewed closely to the president in his recent Senate primary election — his campaign website touts the president's "Complete and Total Endorsement."
Graham was born in Central, S.C., in 1955 and lived with his family in a single room behind their liquor store, restaurant and pool hall, according to his campaign biography. His parents died while Graham was still in school. After their death, Graham became the primary caretaker of his younger sister, Darline, whom he eventually legally adopted.
In a statement on the social media platform X, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster described Graham as "irreplaceable," adding, "We shall not see his likes again."
McMaster, a Republican, will appoint a successor to serve the remainder of Graham's term. A replacement Republican nominee for this fall's general election race will be determined by a special election in August.
NPR's Brian Mann and Claudia Grisales contributed to this report.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
A program that helps connect schools and libraries to the internet at discounted rates is under review by the Federal Communications Commission. Educators and advocates are bracing for the funding to shrink or be eliminated.
Backstory: E-Rate has had a notable impact since its founding. It was created by Congress in 1996, when only 14% of schools and libraries could access the internet. That number is now near 100%. The FCC has overseen the program through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so when the agency announced a full review of the program in late June, some were confused.
Why now? The Project 2025 blueprint singled out federal broadband policy as a target for cutting agency spending. Current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr helped write that chapter of the document, compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was meant to guide the second Trump administration.
Read on ... for more on what cutting the school internet subsidy would mean for students.
A program that helps connect schools and libraries to the internet at discounted rates is under review by the Federal Communications Commission. Educators and advocates are bracing for the funding to shrink or be eliminated.
The so-called E-Rate program, created in the 1990s, has considerable bipartisan support. The agency's recent focus on the program has left educators, including David Thurston, on edge.
Thurston oversees technology for the 33 school districts nested inside San Bernardino County. The area covers more than 20,000 square miles of Southern California: "We have mountain regions, far-flung desert regions, and then our urban and suburban areas. We're a really diverse county," Thurston says.
The county already built the infrastructure to get internet access from the edge of Los Angeles all the way to the state's eastern border, but the spending doesn't end once the fiber-optic cables are installed. Internet access bills come monthly.
"There's no doing without," he says. School districts "are gonna have to pick up the costs."
For San Bernardino districts, that's tens of thousands of dollars every month.
"Those are ongoing, essentially, utility costs," he says. "That's what E-Rate pays for."
E-Rate has had a notable impact since its founding. It was created by Congress in 1996, when only 14% of schools and libraries could access the internet. That number is now near 100%. The FCC has overseen the program through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so when the agency announced a full review of the program in late June, some were confused.
"By its own data and its own measurement, the program is healthy," Thurston says. "The program is doing what it needs to and is important."
Others saw this coming. The Project 2025 blueprint singled out federal broadband policy as a target for cutting agency spending.
Current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr helped write that chapter of the document, compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was meant to guide the second Trump administration.
Less predictable was the chairman's reasoning for reviewing the program: kids getting too much screen time. In the now-approved notice of proposed rulemaking, the FCC calls for a review "to better protect children when using E-Rate-funded networks, including to limit screen time."
His prepared statement at the commission's June hearing focused heavily on the dangers of screen time for kids and the growing body of research around it.
Since January, states including Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation that calls for reevaluating technology's role in teaching and testing, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, recently approved a policy to limit screen time for its students.
Some advocates for limiting screen time at school say gutting E-Rate funding isn't the way to reduce how much time kids are spending on devices.
"We believe there are ways of strengthening school policies to promote more limited and privacy-protecting use of EdTech without taking away critical E-Rate funding," said Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay, a nonprofit focused on digital safety for kids, in a statement to NPR.
Although states and districts are searching for ways to limit screen time, few — if any — are looking to operate without the internet altogether. Many schools rely on internet-based systems to track attendance, monitor school bus routes and give tests required by their state. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 48 states now have some kind of online component with exams.
Bob Bocher, a senior fellow with the American Library Association (ALA), says that because the program is written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC likely cannot fully eliminate it. And last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Universal Service Fund, which collects the money that schools and libraries in turn use to lower internet costs, is constitutional.
But the FCC could change the way the E-Rate program is run to make it more complicated, so the ALA is still worried.
Bocher, who helped work on the original law back in the '90s, worries the program could become so onerous it drives schools and libraries away by design.
"It's like death by a thousand cuts," he says, "death by a thousand rules and regulations."
While internet access has expanded significantly since 1996, internet pricing and options haven't changed the way Bocher or his contemporaries expected.
"A common assumption that a lot of people had [was] … competition will evolve," he says. "And then drive down the price."
In cities, this may be true, but for many rural and remote areas, competition for internet service providers, or ISPs, is nonexistent.
"In rural Alaska, we don't have numerous options," says Patrick Mayer, superintendent for the remote Alaska Gateway School District. "We have one provider."
His district, where some students rely on planes to get to school in the winter months, has just under 400 students. Still, the district spends more than half a million dollars per year to ensure it has internet access at its six schools. The price tag is high, but the connection is what allows them to keep up with the rest of the world.
"It means the difference between having a school in the 21st century," Mayer says, "or a school in the 20th century."
The expansion of connectivity in his district allows students to take dual-enrollment courses online with a local college and access virtual speech and occupational therapy.
"To backfill that funding," he says, "would be very, very difficult."
He imagines there would be no way around cutting down on staff and student services to find money to pay the district's entire internet bill. For now, he's focused on making some noise.
Once the FCC officially publishes notice of its planned review, the public can comment for 60 days. After that, there will be a reply comment period of 30 days, followed by a full review of all of that input by the agency. The process can take a long time, but Mayer and other advocates are already working to draw attention to the issue.
He spent a few days this month in Washington, D.C., to meet with legislators about the importance of keeping Alaska's students connected.
Topline:
Ascot Hills Park, a 93-acre nature park of hiking trails and restored native habitats in El Sereno, turns 20 this year.
Why it matters: The land is owned by LADWP and was used previously for water storage. One proposal for the plot in 2000 would have leveled the hills for a sports complex with soccer fields.
But then: El Sereno residents and a retired civil engineer from Mount Washington built consensus among stakeholders across local agencies and the community to build a nature reserve.
Read on … to learn about that 20 year journey.
A park is a city’s heart and soul. At its highest calling, it’s a community’s conscience.
Such is the case with Ascot Hills Park, 93 acres of hiking paths and native habitats built 20 years ago in the Eastside neighborhood of El Sereno, thanks to a retired civil engineer and residents who wanted the land to return to nature — and to the community.
"There was nothing there," said Val Marquez, one of those residents, who's lived in El Sereno for more than 50 years. "It was just hillsides, fenced off for the most part."
Today, dirt trails are molded into the hills. Some dip down to a lush canyon of native trees and shrubs fed by a small stream.
Others take you higher — way higher.
“On a foggy morning, you can go to the east ridge and you're above the clouds,” said Raymond Rios, another early resident behind the efforts. “Or you can go on a beautiful evening to the west ridge and look at what the Lord painted in the sky.”
The idea of a park came up as early as 1930 but never came to pass.
In the 1990s, Jerry Schneider was getting a master's degree in landscape architecture, a passion of his after retiring as a civil engineer. His thesis fieldwork took him to El Sereno. He and his colleague saw an ideal site in its dormant hillsides — a place to turn natural landscapes into hands-on classrooms for students from two nearby high schools.
"The area was the subject of a lot of political ideas and proposals that did not resonate with me or a lot of the community," Schneider said. Those ideas included a sports complex, proposed in 2000, that would have leveled the hills.
At a community hearing attended by Antonio Villaraigosa — who went on to represent District 14 on the City Council and later became mayor — Schneider remembered, "We lined up all the students and science teachers and others and we all basically told Antonio the neighborhood wants an open space. In fact, nature — it could be the main theme of the park."
Money came through Proposition 40, a 2002 parks bond, and a lease was hammered out between LADWP — which has owned the site for over a century for water storage — and the Department of Recreation and Parks.
"Nothing happens by itself,” said Schneider, who lives in Mount Washington, of importance of Villaraigosa's buy-in. "He was key because we needed political support."
The park opened in 2006 with little more than a gravel driveway and a few rocks to sit on — what old-timers call Phase 1.
"We were ready to have a ribbon-cutting and we were just waiting for the state to pay for the bill, basically," Marquez said. "And they came back and said, 'Where's the bathroom? You forgot the bathroom.'"
The full park — amphitheater, benches, picnic tables, a restored stream, new trails — didn't open until 2011, delayed three years by the Great Recession.
"Jerry [Schneider] made sure that it stayed as a natural habitat," Marquez said. "If it wasn't for him, that could've been a development. That could've been a regular park with soccer fields."
Ascot Hills Park
Where: 4371 Multnomah St., Los Angeles
Hours: 5:30 a.m. to sundown daily
Volunteering: There are many ways to volunteer, including joining the Green Team for park restoration or the Nursery Monthly Action Day to plant native plants.
Check the park's website for dates.
Today, the 86-year-old Schneider runs the park's monthly volunteering program and can still be found at Ascot a few times each week, pulling out weeds and checking in on the native plants and trees planted by volunteers over the last two decades. Students from Wilson High drop in to help out routinely for class credit.
Since 2024, an experiment to grow a micro-forest of California natives has been underway over a 10,000-square-foot plot. It's thriving, despite minimal watering and upkeep, proving there's a cost-efficient way to restore habitat anywhere in this city.
"After two years, it's self-sufficient," said Demian Willette, a Loyola Marymount University biology professor who is leading the research. "You plant it, you let it go. You let nature take over."
Willette also chairs Ascot's volunteer-run Park Advisory Board, part of a new generation of stewards that include Lluvia Arras, who remembered what Schneider said when she first started to volunteer.
"He reminded me that it's slow, steady work," Arras said. "He's like, 'One day you're gonna look back and you're gonna see the progress and feel proud.'"
Their advocacy didn't stop at Ascot. Marquez, an original Park Advisory Board member, went on to build the El Sereno Arroyo Playground in 2012, informed by his experience at Ascot.
Rios, the current secretary, is active at neighboring Hazard Park. In the mid-2010s he worked with residents to beat back a USC proposal to improve its Health Sciences campus that would take away parkland.
"Not only are we park advocates," Rios said. "We're community advocates."
They are one and the same thing.
