California stops funding police transparency database

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(The Center Square) - California will stop funding a state-wide database intended to uncover police misconduct and use-of-force records, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief fiscal policy advisors confirmed to The Center Square.

UC Berkeley received a $6.87 million appropriation to fund the website in 2023, but the funds will expire at the end of this month. The Police Records Access Project launched in 2025 with roughly 1.5 million pages of internal law enforcement records from 1965 to 2024. 

But a review by The Center Square found the website has not received frequent updates. The database’s most recent case is from September 2024. It’s the only case uploaded from the past two years. Zero cases have been uploaded from 2025 or 2026.

Journalists running the program said they were working hard to try and get the website up to date, but they would benefit from more funding.

“Whether we receive more funding is up to the Legislature and other funders,” said Lisa Pickoff-White, director of research for the Police Records Access Project at UC Berkeley. “Further funding would allow us to release more records, and to continue to gather the records, and to continue to make improvements and release more information.”

Newsom has repeatedly declined requests to comment on the website.

“It is our understanding that assistance was needed initially to create the system, but that ongoing costs estimated at about $1.5 million annually would be covered without state funds,” said Erika Li, the chief deputy director of budgets at the California Department of Finance.

Advocates for police transparency have criticized Newsom’s approach, instead calling for a statewide mandate requiring law enforcement agencies to publish the data themselves. 

“Why have Berkeley be the middle person?” asked Chris Burbank, a former police chief who now consults for law enforcement agencies across the country. “I’m a little dumbfounded. I can’t figure out why they’d want to do it this way… There just seems to be a better way to do it.”

Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, referred to the police transparency portal as a good idea that should have been run through the government itself. He criticized Newsom for funding UC Berkeley instead of setting up the transparency portal through the California Attorney General’s Office.

“Good idea, bad implementation,” DeMaio said. “I think that transparency is wonderful. If we want to improve trust and confidence in policing, we need to make sure that we have a transparent process for people to see allegations and responses.”

DeMaio said he would consider an appropriation to set up and maintain a transparency portal through the California Attorney General’s Office.

But for UC Berkeley?

“Not a dime,” DeMaio said. “Newsom and (California Attorney General Rob Bonta) have all the time in the world and all the lawyers in the world to go after local government on certain topics, but not on this one? This is politics. It's not about transparency.”

The Center Square has been seeking answers to funding questions from UC Berkeley for more than a month. According to Andrea Lampros, a spokesperson for the school, the only person authorized to answer those questions was busy with finals and is now unavailable because he is going on sabbatical. Last week, the school said it would not be able to release public records related to state funding for approximately 10 weeks.