Dylan Kubeny, a student at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, served as the primary data hunter and co-author on this project. This post was updated on Nov. 11, 2021 to reflect a project name change: As of August 31, 2021, Stanford Libraries' Systemic Racism Tracker became the KNOW Systemic Racism project. 

At this moment in history, law enforcement agencies in the United States face a long-overdue reevaluation of their priorities, practices, and processes for holding police officers accountable for both unconscious biases and overt abuse of power. 

But any examination of law enforcement requires transparency first: the public’s ability to examine what those priorities, practices, and processes are. While police are charged with enforcing the law, they too have their own rules to follow, and too often, those rules are opaque to the public. An imbalance in access to information is an imbalance of power. 

Today, EFF in partnership with Stanford Libraries' KNOW Systemic Racism project is releasing a data set with links to 458 policy manuals from California law enforcement agencies, including most police departments and sheriff offices and some district attorney offices, school district police departments, and university public safety departments. This data set represents our first attempt to aggregate these policy documents following the passage of S.B. 978, a state law that requires local law enforcement agencies to publish this information online. 

These policy manuals cover everything from administrative duties and record keeping to the use of force and the deployment of surveillance technologies. These documents reveal police officers’ responsibilities and requirements, but they also expose shortcomings, including an overreliance on boilerplate policies generated by a private company. 

Download the data set as an CSV file, or scroll to the bottom to find a catalog of links. 

Until a few years ago, many law enforcement agencies in California were reluctant to share their policy documents with the public. While a handful of agencies voluntarily chose to post these records online, the most reliable way to obtain these records was through the California Public Records Act (CPRA), which creates the legal right for everyday people to request information from the government. Most people don't know they have this power, and even fewer know how to exercise it effectively. 

To make these police records more accessible, California State Sen. Steven Bradford sponsored S.B. 978, which says all local law enforcement agencies "shall conspicuously post on their Internet Web sites all current standards, policies, practices, operating procedures, and education and training materials that would otherwise be available to the public if a request was made pursuant to the California Public Records Act.” 

The requirement became fully effective in January 2020, and now the public can visit individual websites to find links to these documents. However, despite the requirement that these records be posted "conspicuously," the links can often be challenging to find. With our new data set, the public now has access to a catalog of hundreds of currently available documents in one place. 

EFF supported SB 978's passage back in 2018 to increase government transparency through internet technology. We are currently collaborating with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, to aggregate these policies. Stanford Libraries is using these records to build a searchable database that harvests data about institutional practices that harm communities of color. The SRT's goals are to serve as a growing collection of references, documents, and data to support research and education about systematic racism. The SRT also aims to empower people to take action against harmful practices by knowing their rights and identifying, appraising, and connecting with government agencies, non-profit organizations, and grassroots groups that address racism.

"In order to understand, interrogate and work towards changing the very structures of systemic racism in policing, it is vital that we collect both current and historical policy and training manuals," said Felicia Smith, head of Stanford Libraries Learning and Outreach, who created the SRT project.

Although this data set is but the first step in a longer-term project, several elements of concern emerged in our initial analysis.

First and foremost, perhaps the most conspicuous pattern with these policies is the connection to Lexipol, a private company that sells boilerplate policies and training materials to law enforcement agencies. Over and over again, the police policies were formatted the same, used identical language, and included a copyright mark from this company. 

Lexipol has come under fire for writing policies that are too vague or permissive and for significantly differing from best practices. More often than not, rather than draft policies specifically tailored to the specific agency, these agencies simply copied and pasted the standard Lexipol policy. Mother Jones reported that 95% of agencies in California purchased policies or training materials from Lexipol. Our data showed that at least 379 agencies published policies from Lexipol. 

This raises questions about whether police are soliciting guidance from the community or policymakers or are simply accepting the recommendations from a private company that is not accountable to the public. 

In addition, we made the following findings: 

• Although most agencies complied with S.B. 978 and posted at least some materials online, many agencies still had failed to take action even a year after the law took effect. In those cases, we filed CPRA requests for the records and requested they be posted on their websites. In some instances the agencies followed through, but we are still waiting on some entities such as the Bell Police Department and the Crescent City Police Department to upload their records. 
• While most agencies complied with the requirement to post policies online, only a portion published training materials. In some cases, agencies only published the training session outlines and not the actual training presentations.
• Link rot undermines transparency. As we conducted our research over just a few months, URLs for policies would change or disappear as agencies updated their policies or relaunched their websites. That is one reason we include archived links in this data set. 

In the coming months, Stanford Libraries aims to introduce a more robust tool that will allow for searching policies across departments and archiving policy changes over time. In the interim, this data set brings the public one step closer to understanding police practices and to holding law enforcement agencies accountable.

SB 978 Policy and Training Catalog 

The table below contains links to the SB 978 materials made available by local law enforcement agencies across California. There is little to no consistency across agencies for how this information is published online. Below you will find links to the primary page where a user would find links to SB 978 documents. In some cases, this may just be the agency's home page, which includes an SB 978 link in the sidebar. Because we have found that these links break quite often, we have also included an archived version of the link through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We have also included direct links to the policies and training materials, however in many cases this is the same link as the primary page. 

We used the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training’s list of California law enforcement agencies to prioritize municipal police, sheriff’s offices, university and school district police, and district attorneys in our data collection. Future research will cover other forms of local law enforcement.

Download the data set as an CSV file.