Watch Now: The Wandering Officer—New Databases for Police Accountability
What does justice look like for communities struggling with police violence?
For Cat Brooks, Co-Founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP), true justice isn’t possible. “There is no such thing as justice when we’re talking about police terror and the stealing of our community members’ lives,” Brooks said at a recent event co-hosted by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, APTP, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network (CLEAN) and the National Police Index (NPI).
Hosted at Kinfolx in Oakland, CA, the event brought together activists, scholars, and community members to discuss how new transparency efforts can put data about police misconduct and use of force into the hands of citizens, investigative journalists, and family members who have lost loved ones to police violence. Data can then be used to find out the truth about police violence, support court cases against abusive officers, and support legislative reform efforts.
You can watch the full video of the event here:
During the event, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist trina reynolds-tyler invited attendees to pull up the newly launched CLEAN database on their phones. HRDAG was part of the coalition behind this searchable database, which includes millions of pages of documents about tens of thousands of police use-of-force and misconduct cases. The data in the database were made available thanks to California’s Right to Know Act of 2018, which established new transparency requirements for police violations and killings.
Panelists discussed the problem of the “wandering officer”—a police officer who kills someone, engages in excessive use of force, engages in sexual misconduct, or commits other egregious ethical violations and then moves to a different jurisdiction. By moving from one police department to another, these police officers often evade accountability and make it more difficult to show a pattern of abusive behavior. To address this problem, advocates in California passed Senate Bill 2 (Kenneth Ross, Jr. Police Decertification Act of 2021), which established a statewide system to revoke or suspend certification for officers involved in serious misconduct. It’s a way to keep officers in California who engage in major ethical violations from quietly relocating to another department within the state.
This event was particularly powerful because it included the voices of people who had lost family members to police violence. Uncle Bobby X, the uncle of Oscar Grant who died at the hands of BART police in 2009, spoke about successful efforts to pass reform legislation in California to improve transparency and reduce police violence. However, he also cautioned that systems for accountability often failed victims’ families. For example, he pointed to the lengthy legal battle in the aftermath of the death of Steven Taylor. Taylor was killed in a Walmart by San Leandro police officer Jason Fletcher in 2020. The case was dropped in December 2025 by the Alameda County DA. As Uncle Bobby X explained during the panel: “We spent five years fighting to get this officer held accountable and then the DA dropped the case. So this is another tactic that they used to lessen our ability to have officers held accountable for the murders they commit.”
Another speaker was Amanda Majail-Blanco, a student, youth organizer, and the sister of Erik Salgado, who was shot and killed by California Highway Police in 2020. One of the officers involved in that killing was involved in another fatal traffic stop in 2016 in Orange County. Majail-Blanco spoke about the battle to get public records related to her brother’s death, saying: “When we finally got the information, a lot of stuff was redacted out of it. A lot of stuff was blacked out.” Majail-Blanco has helped several other families who have lost loved ones to police violence since her brother’s death.
The stories shared at this event make clear that data alone does not create justice. Databases like CLEAN are tools, but their power depends on whether communities, journalists, lawmakers, and courts use them. For the families who have spent years fighting for answers, transparency is not an abstract policy goal; it is often one of the few ways to know the truth about how a loved one was lost.
Watch the full event. Learn more about HRDAG’s work on the CLEAN database.