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:
Milwaukee’s brilliant bullpen slammed the door late and the Brewers rallied past the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-4 on Thursday in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series to earn their first trip to the World Series since 1982.
What happened: Shohei Ohtani’s first home run this postseason helped put the Dodgers ahead 4-0 in the second inning before the Brewers came back to complete a four-game sweep of the two-time defending World Series champions a year after getting swept by Los Angeles in the NLCS.
Garrett Mitchell hit a go-ahead homer in the sixth inning, Milwaukee’s brilliant bullpen slammed the door late and the Brewers rallied past the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-4 on Thursday in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series to earn their first trip to the World Series since 1982.
No. 9 hitter David Hamilton’s two-out solo shot off Edwin Díaz gave the Brewers a two-run cushion in the ninth. Hamilton had just four homers in the regular season.
“We got down early tonight and we were like, it’s going to be a great story,” Brewers captain Christian Yelich said. “We’re going to come back and win this. Like, stay together, start chipping away. And that’s exactly what they did.”
Shohei Ohtani’s first home run this postseason helped put the Dodgers ahead 4-0 in the second inning before the Brewers came back to complete a four-game sweep of the two-time defending World Series champions a year after getting swept by Los Angeles in the NLCS.
Milwaukee became the first major league club to complete a postseason sweep after getting swept by that same opponent in the previous postseason.
“Playing with that chip on our shoulder,” Brewers reliever Aaron Ashby said. “You don’t ever know what to expect going into a series like that last year. You don’t know how bad it can be, and then it was as bad as it was. And we came out and we survived, and we came back this year, and those guys played their tails off.”
The Brewers lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games in their only other World Series appearance, when Milwaukee played in the American League.
With the score tied 4-all, Mitchell fell behind 0-2 before reliever Tanner Scott threw three straight balls for a full count. Mitchell’s 409-foot leadoff drive to center field — the first homer of his career on an 0-2 count — put the Brewers ahead for the first time. Mitchell also homered in their 6-2 victory Wednesday.null
“I’ve always dreamt of moments like these as a kid,” Mitchell said.
The Brewers’ bullpen coolly turned away multiple threats when the Dodgers had the potential tying run on base.
Winning pitcher JoJo Romero struck out Max Muncy with Kyle Tucker at third to end the sixth.
Ashby, who worked three scoreless innings for a save, struck out Ohtani swinging before Mookie Betts grounded out with Andy Pages at third to end the seventh. Will Smith doubled to right with one out in the eighth and was safe at third when the ball got away from Sal Frelick for an error before Ashby got Tucker to fly out and Teoscar Hernández to strike out.
The Brewers tied it in the fifth, when the Dodgers bullpen issued four walks and Milwaukee stole two bases. Hamilton’s single chased starter Tyler Glasnow and scored Frelick, who walked and stole second, to pull Milwaukee to 4-3.
Alex Vesia came in and promptly walked Brice Turang and William Contreras to load the bases. Vesia then walked NLCS MVP Jake Bauers with two outs to force in Hamilton with the tying run.
Glasnow retired his first 10 batters — six on strikeouts — before the Brewers got to him in the fourth. Turang walked, Contreras hit a ground-rule double and Bauers followed with another ground-rule double that closed Milwaukee to 4-2.
Ohtani broke out of his postseason slump with a three-run homer after Pages’ RBI single in the second. The four-time MVP released weeks of pent-up frustration by raising his arms and yelling and the crowd of 49,104 joined him in celebration.
Topline:
Parts of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton have been ordered to evacuate, and the 5 Freeway has been closed in both directions as a wildfire burns in the area. The Henderson Fire had charred more than 1,100 acres as of 4:40 p.m.
What we know so far: The 5 Freeway was closed between Harbor Drive, near Oceanside, and Basilone Road, near the Orange County line. The Camp Pendleton Fire Department was fighting the fire, according to Cal Fire.
Read on ... for more on evacuations and weather conditions.
This is a developing story. For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:
Parts of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton have been ordered to evacuate, and the 5 Freeway was briefly closed in both directions due to a wildfire in the area. The Henderson Fire had charred more than 1,118 acres as of 7 p.m.
CHP closed the 5 Freeway between Harbor Drive, near Oceanside, and Basilone Road, near the Orange County line, but began reopening the interstate just before 6 p.m.
The Camp Pendleton Fire Department was fighting the fire, according to Cal Fire.
According to Cal Fire: "An evacuation order has been published for the Las Flores (41 Area). All affected personnel, please evacuate to Paige Field House, located in the 11 Area." A secondary evacuation point was set up at 21 Area gym, according to the Camp Pendleton Facebook page.
Check out LAist's wildfire recovery guide
If you have to evacuate:
Navigating fire conditions:
How to help yourself and others:
How to start the recovery process:
What to do for your kids:
Prepare for the next disaster:
Topline:
A Costa Mesa woman who pleaded guilty earlier this year for registering her dog to vote and casting ballots in two elections has had her case dismissed, according to the district attorney’s office Thursday. She won’t serve time but will have to pay for four anti-voter fraud billboards that feature her dog’s image.
Background: Laura Lee Yourex, 64, was charged with five felonies in 2025 for illegally registering her dog and casting ballots on its behalf. Yourex was facing up to six years in prison. In April, Yourex pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of knowingly registering a “non-existent person to vote,” and the DA’s office dismissed the remaining four felony charges against her. LAist did not immediately hear from Yourex’s lawyer.
More on the billboards: As part of the plea deal, Yourex was required to pay $1,500 for four anti-voter fraud billboards along the 55 and 22 freeways in Orange County for the Nov. 3 General Election. The billboards read, “Don’t be a dog. Voter Fraud is a Crime. If you can’t legally vote, don’t vote. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office will prosecute.”
Why this matters: The dog incident comes at a time of heightened debate over voter ID. In the General Election, Californians will be asked whether to require voters to show proof of ID at polling places and provide identification numbers on mail-in ballots. Currently, voters only need to provide an ID and Social Security number when they register to vote.
Go deeper: Voter ID initiative qualifies for California’s November election.
Topline:
California’s wine industry is still trying to figure out how to adapt to a world with fewer alcohol drinkers, where even the most high-end wineries are fighting a losing battle. Because the state has more wine than people want to drink, some wineries are quietly selling their premium bottles under generic retail home brands like Costco’s Kirkland Signature or Kroger and Aldi labels.
Sales: Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing grape prices to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production.
“They have way too much of it, and they haven’t been able to sell it the last few years,” said Jess Lander, wine reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, during a conversation on AirTalk, LAist 89.3’s daily news show.
Bargain bottles: Lander has reported that bottles that typically cost around $150 are now, in some cases, going for less than $30 under a different brand label.
How to take advantage: Lander says if you’re looking to take advantage of the surplus bargain, look at the region on the bottle and then do a little experimenting with your palate.
Listen to the full conversation above: To learn more about the wine industry’s outlook and the effects on consumers.
Topline:
California’s wine industry is still trying to figure out how to adapt to a world with fewer alcohol drinkers, where even the most high-end wineries are fighting a losing battle. Because the state has more wine than people want to drink, some wineries are quietly selling their premium bottles under generic retail home brands like Costco’s Kirkland Signature or Kroger and Aldi labels.
Sales: Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing grape prices to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production.
“They have way too much of it, and they haven’t been able to sell it the last few years,” said Jess Lander, wine reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, during a conversation on AirTalk, LAist 89.3’s daily news show.
Bargain bottles: Lander has reported that bottles that typically cost around $150 are now, in some cases, going for less than $30 under a different label.
How to take advantage: Lander says if you’re looking to take advantage of the surplus bargain, look at the region on the bottle and then do a little experimenting with your palate.
Listen to the full conversation above: To learn more about the wine industry’s outlook and the effects on consumers.
