California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits.

The sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS). 

Records obtained by EFF also included numerous cases of other forms of database abuse in 2023, such as police allegedly using data for personal vendettas. While many violations resulted only in officers or other staff being retrained in appropriate use of the database, departments across the state reported that violations in 2023 led to 24 officers being suspended, six officers resigning, and nine being fired.

CLETS contains a lot of sensitive information and is meant to provide officers in California with access to a variety of databases, including records from the Department of Motor Vehicles, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, Criminal Justice Information Services, and the National Crime Information Center. Law enforcement agencies with access to CLETS are required to inform the state Justice Department of any investigations and discipline related to misuse of the system. This mandatory reporting helps to provide oversight and transparency around how local agencies are using and abusing their access to the array of databases. 

A slide from a Long Beach Police Department training for new recruits.

Misuse can take many forms, ranging from sharing passwords to using the system to look up romantic partners or celebrities. In 2019, CADOJ declared that using CLETS data for "immigration enforcement" is considered misuse under the California Values Act.  

EFF periodically files California Public Records Act requests for the data and records generated by these CLETS misuse disclosures. To help improve access to this data, EFF's investigations team has compiled and compressed that information from the years 2019 - 2023 for public download. Researchers and journalists can look up the individual data per agency year-to-year. 

Download the 2019-2023 data here. Data from previous years is available here: 2010-2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.  

California agencies are required to report misuse of CLETS to CADOJ by February 1 of the following year, which means numbers for 2024 are due to the state agency at the end of this month. However, it often takes the state several more months to follow up with agencies that do not respond and to enter information from the individual forms into a database. 

Across California between 2019 and 2023, there have been:

• 761 investigations of CLETS misuse, resulting in findings of at least 7,635 individual violations of the system’s rules
• 55 officer suspensions, 50 resignations, and 42 firings related to CLETS misuse
• six misdemeanor convictions and one felony conviction related to CLETS misuse

As we reviewed the data made public since 2019, there were a f