Hey, everybody, it's Kelly, and there's this new NPR series that we want to share with you here in the embedded feed.

It's all about what happens when police do something wrong.

Here in California, a few years back, the state passed this law that did something pretty incredible.

For the first time, it allowed the public to access stuff we had never had access to before.

Basically, the internal investigations of police.

Usually, when an officer is accused of doing something wrong, like treating someone committing violence, sexual harassment, or assault,

what happens is they will investigate themselves.

Like, another officer will investigate the officer who's been accused, and then there'll be some kind of decision.

But then, in California, at least, all of that information stayed secret.

Until now.

So, after this law was passed, our colleagues at KQED in San Francisco, Suki Lewis, and Sandia Durgs, along with some other reporters,

requested these internal investigation records from every single law enforcement agency in the state of California.

So, overall, they've gotten hundreds of case files, recordings of interviews with accused officers, in some cases, body cam footage of the original incident,

and they've done tons of interviews to reconstruct what happened in a bunch of cases.

And what they found is that even when police officers are being investigated for wrongdoing, they still have all these protections.

And, this whole system that looks like it's about accountability is actually about something else.

The series is called On Our Watch, and we're going to be putting episodes here each week.

We start with the case in a small town in Northern California.

It's the first time the reporters were able to see how this police accountability system actually works.

Here's the show.

The police department is the police department.

Police department.

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