It’s quite democracy-affirming, if somewhat startling in its frankness, to open up the website for the brand new Police Records Access Project database for the state of California.

The public can now search internal affairs documents and other police-misconduct records from nearly 700 California law enforcement agencies through a database created by UC Berkeley and Stanford ...

The database is the first of its kind in the nation and will allow the public to search for particular types of misconduct or uses of force.

The Police Records Access Project database, now available to the public, contains roughly 1.5 million pages of records from 12,000 officer-misconduct and use-of-force cases in California.