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:
A new NASA space telescope launched Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will help scientists probe the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries of the universe.
Details: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about the size of a tour bus, lifted off at 4:26 a.m. PT on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The 18,000-pound spacecraft is now on a million-mile journey that will take it to its new home in space.
What's next: Roman is on a kind of ghost hunt, searching for more evidence of dark matter — mysterious, invisible stuff whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together and define the overarching structure of the cosmos.
A new NASA space telescope launched Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will help scientists probe the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries of the universe.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is about the size of a tour bus, lifted off at 4:26 a.m. PT on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The 18,000-pound spacecraft is now on a million-mile journey that will take it to its new home in space.
"What a glorious dawn launch," NASA's Jackie Townsend, Roman telescope project manager, said at a press briefing soon after liftoff. "The ride was magnificent. It put us right where we wanted to be."
More good news came shortly after launch as the telescope began deploying its solar panels and other instruments. "Ground controllers at NASA Goddard have been receiving telemetry data from Roman, and apparently all systems are nominal," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.
Roman has an unusual origin story: Initially designed as a spy telescope for the National Reconnaissance Office, the spacecraft was donated to NASA instead. The new telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer who was known as the 'Mother of Hubble' for her championing of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Her namesake observatory will have the sharpness of Hubble but a field of view that is at least 100 times larger, allowing it to image huge swaths of the sky at once.
Before it can do that, the Roman Space Telescope will have to get to its new home in the sky about a million miles away. Roman will live at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point known as L2. There, the competing gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Sun help the telescope keep a steady orbit while using minimal fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope orbits at this point, which gives the spacecraft an unobstructed view of the sky.
"It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can," said NASA's Jeremy Perkins, an integration and test scientist on the mission. "It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that the focus is right, the pointing is right."
Roman is on a kind of ghost hunt, searching for more evidence of dark matter — mysterious, invisible stuff whose gravitational influence appears to hold galaxies together and define the overarching structure of the cosmos. Roman will study how gravity subtly affects the path of light along great distances throughout a massive survey of the sky. By doing this, the telescope will help map both normal and dark matter, giving scientists a better understanding of just what this elusive substance might be.
Astronomers will also use Roman's observations to uncover dark energy, the strange force that is believed to drive the expansion of the universe. Scientists' understanding of dark energy comes from observations of a kind of exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova. These supernovas appear to shine at known and predictable brightness throughout the cosmos, giving them the nickname of 'standard candles'. By cataloguing even more of these supernovas, scientists hope to develop a better understanding of how dark energy works, which could fundamentally change the way astronomers view the universe.
Roman will also search for planets outside our solar system. Since astronomers confirmed their existence in the 1990s, more than 6,000 exoplanets have been identified. With Roman, NASA expects to identify more than 100,000 of them by identifying dips in starlight caused by a planet passing in front of its own star. The telescope also hopes to find some 1,000 through microlensing — a technique that searches for tiny changes in background starlight caused by the gravity of a far-off planet.
"Why do we care so much about exoplanets? Because one of our main goals at NASA is answering the question: Are we alone in the universe," Nicky Fox, NASA's associate administrator of the science mission directive, said at the Sunday morning briefing.
The spacecraft is poised to bring scientists a step closer to answering that question: It will demonstrate technology that can take a picture of a planet by selectively blocking out the light from its home star.
"We are going to make this giant leap forward with the coronagraph technology that is going to allow us to look at these distant worlds and start to really resolve the atmosphere around them to let us know if they could be habitable," she said.
The telescope will beam back 1.4 terabytes of raw science data each day, using a refrigerator-sized high-gain antenna. The data will be available immediately to scientists and the public.
"Roman's database at the end of its prime mission after five years is going to be bigger than your standard music streaming platform," Perkins said.
Because of the massive amounts of data, NASA is making it available to anyone through a cloud-based system called Roman Nexus. For Perkins, that's what makes this mission unique — anyone can look at the raw data and find new discoveries.
"It's all the things that we are not expecting to see," he said. "It's all these one-in-a-million things that we're going to be able to see with Roman that really excites me."
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Gov. Gavin Newsom backed off his plans to ease costs for utilities following wildfires they cause, striking a narrower deal with Democratic lawmakers on Saturday.
Details: Newsom and Senate and Assembly leaders agreed on a narrower package of wildfire policies, including prohibiting private equity groups from investing in wildfire claims and denying utility CEO bonuses in the years their companies cause fatal fires.
Why it matters: Homeowners, insurers and fire survivors have said his original plan would have shifted those costs onto them.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday backed off his proposal to reduce costs for electrical utilities after their equipment sparks wildfires, agreeing instead to a narrower deal after homeowners, insurers and fire survivors argued his original plan would have shifted those costs onto them.
Instead, Newsom and Senate and Assembly leaders agreed on a narrower package of wildfire policies, including prohibiting private equity groups from investing in wildfire claims and denying utility CEO bonuses in the years their companies cause fatal fires.
The deal is a victory for lawmakers who refused to reduce damages to victims and shift costs away from utilities. Opponents included insurance companies, consumer advocates and survivors of the January 2025 Eaton Fire caused by Southern California Edison equipment that killed 19 people in Altadena.
Under the agreement announced Saturday, the state would create a “fast-pay” program for survivors’ property loss, pain and suffering in the wake of a utility-caused fire. It would include deadlines for determining which claims are valid within 60 days of receipt, and settlement offers within 30 days after that, but survivors could still pursue the long process of suing utilities if they choose.
The state also commits to improving its local wildfire mitigation efforts and sharing more data on insurance coverage in areas with fire risk.
The final agreement, which lawmakers will vote on in Senate Bill 492, caps a contentious series of closed-door negotiations between Newsom’s office and legislative leaders on how much utility companies should pay after fires.
Newsom wanted utilities to have to pay less to insurance companies, some wildfire survivors, local governments and corporations claiming damages after a fire. His administration is concerned the mounting costs threaten investor confidence in the state’s three major for-profit utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. He said that could lead to higher borrowing costs for the companies and higher electricity bills for Californians.
Newsom also argued his plan would prioritize paying survivors who lose their homes. In past fires, investors have funded lawsuits or claims have been sold to hedge funds, increasing the number of third parties seeking to profit from wildfire payouts, Newsom’s office has said.
SB 492 does not include most of the proposals Newsom wanted and does not substantially change how much utilities must pay after fires they cause. California’s $18 billion wildfire fund that utilities draw from to pay fire damages — and which would fund claims in the fast-pay program — is funded 50-50 by utility customers and shareholders. Proponents of Newsom’s proposals remain concerned that another catastrophic fire could drain that money, leaving utilities facing a mountain of costs and another round of potential bankruptcies.
Nine of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires were caused by electrical equipment or power lines.
“This system needs full structural reform — not a partial one,” Newsom said in a statement Saturday morning. “I urge the Legislature to build on this progress next year and finish the work we started to secure the Wildfire Fund’s long-term durability, stabilize electricity rates, and ensure fire victims are never again turned into unsecured creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding.”
Sen. Josh Becker, a Menlo Park Democrat who was closely involved in the negotiations, acknowledged that lawmakers would likely have to return to the issue of utility liabilities under a future governor.
“What I heard very clearly, certainly from senators, from the Assembly and even from all the stakeholders was that they’re willing to do that,” he said. “They’re willing to start getting around the table and looking at some of those structural issues. But that takes time. We ran out of time in this session.”
“We certainly stood with fire survivors,” said Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat who represents Palisades Fire survivors. “Challenges with affordability of electricity (remain). That’s not going away.”
The utilities agreed and said there needs to be a long-term solution.
“While we appreciate the efforts made, we are disappointed that the state couldn’t develop comprehensive wildfire reform,” said Southern California Edison spokesperson David Eisenhauer.
San Diego Gas & Electric would not comment and referred questions to Wildfire Victims First, the utility-backed campaign whose priorities aligned with the governor’s wish list.
Campaign spokesperson Nathan Click said the state still needs to make urgent structural reforms “to ensure a fair recovery system.”
PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo said the company is reviewing the bill and is “focused on helping wildfire survivors recover faster, making communities safer, and protecting customer utility bills.” Company stocks tumbled Friday after reports of a potential agreement that did not include any utility cost-shifts.
Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, the Santa Barbara Democrat whose caucus opposed Newsom’s cost-shifting proposals, said in a statement the agreement “supports survivors in their recovery, curbs Wall Street practices that increase costs on consumers, and mitigates the destruction of these wildfires in the first place.”
Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Irvine Democrat who led negotiations for the Assembly, in a statement called the deal “an important step forward.”
“We held the line to protect the people who needed it most,” she said.
The biggest sticking point was the governor’s insistence on eliminating subrogation, which allows insurance companies to sue utilities to recoup their costs for wildfire claims. Lawmakers were staunchly opposed to eliminating that avenue out of concern that it would disrupt the state’s fragile insurance market, raise premiums and cause insurers to flee the state, and they rejected it.
“This outcome keeps costs with the parties responsible for wildfires and helps protect the progress California is making in stabilizing its insurance market,” said Denni Ritter, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
While the deal is a win for the insurance industry, a senator who represents Eaton Fire survivors said it’s important to also hold insurers accountable.
“We know that in many cases, insurance companies delayed and denied fire survivors’ claims and payments, delaying recovery,” said Democratic Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez. “We need all industries to come to the table in a real way.”
State lawmakers also resisted the governor’s effort to limit survivors’ non-economic damages, an important victory for the Eaton Fire survivors who relentlessly campaigned against the proposal.
Fire survivors and consumer advocates credited the Senate, especially Limón, for pushing back on Newsom.
“In the face of extraordinary pressure from some of the most powerful interests in our state, they centered survivors and California families,” said Joy Chen, executive director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network.
Advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which worked in concert with fire survivors, called the negotiations “an exercise in the democratic process.”
“(The Legislature) told (Newsom) they wouldn’t bend in closed-door negotiations,” said Jamie Court, president of the group.
Pérez commended survivors for pressuring lawmakers over the past couple of weeks.
“The fire survivors have shaped this entire conversation,” Pérez said. “They made a tremendous impact.”
Topline:
Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the jazzy, funky music he composed for the show on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.
Keep reading ... for tour details and from LAist reporter Robert Garrova's conversation with Lang about the show’s endearing music legacy.
For many millennials, '90s Nickelodeon shows such as Hey Arnold!, Doug, and Rocko’s Modern Life represent a golden age of animation, with theme songs and music scores often just as weird and offbeat as the characters and storylines.
Take the theme song of Hey Arnold! — an earworm that introduced a generation of young TV viewers to acid jazz, funk, hip-hop and more, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the show's music on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.
LAist’s Robert Garrova caught up with Lang to talk about the show’s endearing music legacy.
Lang: I wish I could take credit for being that intentional about it. But we weren't really hoping to introduce anybody to jazz. That was just a wonderful kinda side benefit of the way the show played out.
Lang: I don't think there's any such thing as music that's too good for a kids' show. I think children have the hugest imagination for absorbing things that they've never seen before, for being delighted by the unusual.
Those things [music scores] all work because the writers and the animators and the background artists and everybody did such an incredible job before it ever showed up at my studio. That's it. You just kind of shut up and get out of the way and let the image kind of play through you in a way.
Jim Lang and his P.S. 118 All Stars band will hit a number of SoCal venues this fall and winter, including Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown on Oct. 26 and The Observatory in Santa Ana on Nov. 29.
Tour dates and more on their Instagram.
Lang: Well, the women that started Nickelodeon and that ran that company in that era were a really unusual breed, and they were super adventurous. They didn't discourage, you know, people doing crazy stuff.
Lang: Oh, it's just such a love fest. It is nostalgic. The music is meaningful to them because the show, after five seasons, there was a sound to it, and people found it relatable. So getting to hear a band actually play that stuff live, it sounds familiar to the audience in a way that I think people were just thrilled by.
Topline:
The tribe behind Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, is celebrating 40 years of gaming. The enterprise started as a bingo hall, when tribal gaming was under scrutiny in the state.
Who are the Yuhaaviatam? The tribal nation is formerly known as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. Their reservation is near Highland in San Bernardino County, but their ancestral land stretches much farther.
About the bingo hall: Early on in tribal gaming, this was how some tribes chose to support themselves. The high-stakes bingo halls weren’t always welcome, though, and some state and local leaders tried to shut them down.
Why does this matter? The Yuhaaviatam got into the business because they needed to pay for critical resources in the community and keep their government funded. Yaamava’ has also become a major employer.
Read on…. to learn about how the tribe went from bingo hall to casino.
Before the 1980s, tribal leaders of the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation were struggling to care for their people. That’s when, like many tribes, they decided to open a bingo hall on their reservation in San Bernardino County.
The enterprise eventually became the powerhouse Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, a place famous across the Southland for its snappy “you in?” slogan and roster of concert billboards, featuring the likes of Pitbull, Stevie Nicks and the Jonas Brothers.
The tribe is celebrating 40 years of gaming. But in between the high-limit gaming rooms, intimate performances and the biggest gaming floor in the West — with over 7,500 slot machines — you’ll find a story of self-determination in the face of California bureaucracy.
The Yuhaaviatam’s homeland is the San Bernardino mountains, valleys and high deserts. They were previously known as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, but recently reclaimed their ancestral name, Yuhaaviatam (yu-HAH-vee-ah-tahm), which means “people of the pines.” According to the tribe, the community was forced to leave after decades of violence, colonization and displacement.
One big change came in the mid 1800s when a San Bernardino militia killed Native people. The Yuhaaviatam’s leader at the time, Paakuma, who was known outside the tribe by his Spanish name of Santos Manuel, led the couple dozen remaining members out of the mountains.
The tribe moved around the region, but the federal government eventually placed them on the San Manuel Reservation in 1891. Johnny Hernandez Jr., the Yuhaaviatam’s vice chairman, told LAist it was a time of hardship.
“ We were put up against the hillside there with non-fertile land and really in an area where people probably didn’t think that we were going to survive,” he said.
The Yuhaaviatam had to rebuild largely on their own. The tribe got by financially with apricot orchards and other small ventures. When members needed money, they’d sell some of their livestock or hold bake sales. Hernandez said it wasn’t enough to fund what people needed.
By the ‘80s, other tribes across the United States were in a similar predicament. Looking for ways to generate other forms of revenue, some turned to bingo halls, often outside the jurisdiction of states’ gambling regulations, as their economic springboard.
Under the leadership of tribal chairman Henry Duro, the Yuhaaviatam proposed opening a high-stakes bingo hall. According to newspaper reports, they faced immediate opposition.
Local officials feared the operation would disrupt nearby neighborhoods and foster illicit activity. One critic was San Bernardino City Councilmember Steve Marks, who reportedly instructed city officials to find “every legal way possible to stop the project.”
“ I think from the community, there was a lot of concern about having gaming in their backyard,” Hernandez said, who’s Duro’s nephew. “Everybody understands that gaming can lead to issues with not only the person, but the families … so we really take that responsibility seriously.”
City leaders tried to push the bingo hall off the reservation and even tried to delay construction in court. The Yuhaaviatam had talks with San Bernardino to find a solution, but according to reports in October 1985, that effort broke down.
Ultimately, the Yuhaaviatam moved forward with building San Manuel Indian Bingo on the reservation, which opened on July 24, 1986. It was a hit. They had sold out nights. People even climbed over the back walls to play.
“A funny story that my chairwoman Lynn always tells is that those ones that really were against [the bingo hall] and had the biggest concerns were the first ones in line to go into the bingo and to game,” Hernandez said.
He grew up next door to the bingo hall and would sit outside to watch the stream of people go in and out. He said the building looked like a box compared to the casino they have now. But inside, hundreds of hopeful bingo winners packed rows upon rows of tables.
“ They would have costume contests and everything, and it was real lively,” Hernandez said. “I remember a lot of people were excited to be there.”
As controversial as the bingo hall was to some, it was also a source of employment for San Bernardino. Kenneth Shoji, the tribe’s spokesperson, told LAist how when the hall opened, much of the area around was in an economic downtown.
“ The air base had closed. Kaiser Steel was closing. Santa Fe [Depot] had down-scaled significantly,” Shoji said. “Many people who came to work here were coming from those industries. In fact, many tribal elders … also came from those businesses.”
San Manuel Indian Bingo opened the door to financial stability, but tribal gaming enterprises still faced trouble in California. State and local leaders wanted to shut them down.
One fight ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Two Native reservations, Cabazon and Morongo, ran bingo and card games in Riverside County, which began a few years before the Yuhaaviatam’s enterprise. Officials argued the state had the right to ban tribal gaming to discourage gambling.
The Supreme Court ended up siding with the tribes in part because California already permitted multiple forms of gaming, like horse racing, card games and a state-sponsored lottery.
The ruling led to the creation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a landmark piece of legislation that Congress signed into law in 1988. It paved the way for tribal nations to run more profitable forms of gaming, like craps and slot machines.
The act established regulations that split gaming into three classes and created a system where tribes would have to make agreements with states before offering the highest level.
Randall Akee, a professor of economic development in Indigenous communities at Harvard University, told LAist it took awhile for California to get on board.
“Tribal gaming really as an industry, larger scale in California, took off in the post-2000 era,” he said.
That came with the passage of Prop. 1A and Prop. 5, which permitted compacts for Class III gaming on tribal lands in California. The deals have been moneymakers. According to the National Indian Gaming Commission, California and northern Nevada (which are calculated together) lead the nation in gross gaming revenue, bringing in $12.6 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Akee said the Yuhaaviatam people have created a large gaming footprint in California despite their small population and geographical size. Overall, the tribe is one of San Bernardino County’s top employers with nearly 8,000 employees, according to Shoji.
They’ve also expanded their gaming enterprise into new, larger buildings. When San Manuel Casino (as the bingo hall was later named) opened in 2021, it was rebranded to Yaamava’ Resort & Casino. The $760 million expansion, with a 17-story hotel tower and 432 rooms and suites, brought their footprint to over 700,000 square feet. A parking structure now stands in place of the former bingo hall.
Hernandez said tribal gaming has helped his community thrive. They use the revenue to pay for critical resources, like supplying medical care to elders, hiring teachers for schools and buying generators to curb power outages. The tribe has also donated over $450 million to local communities.
“ I think the thing that people always forget or don’t understand is that every time we buy a piece of land, we’re just going to throw a casino there,” Hernandez said. “First and foremost, we’re a tribe. We have the needs for our people, and [want to] protect our cultural resources.”
The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation is a financial supporter of LAist. Like other funders, the tribe has no influence on our coverage.
