Put a spotlight on police misconduct
For nearly a decade, California has had absurdly restrictive rules on public access to police misconduct records. Even when allegations against a law-enforcement officer have been sustained by a department — resulting in suspension or firing — the public is shut out from records and appeal hearings. Citizens who file complaints against officers are merely told whether the charges are “sustained” or “unsustained.”
“Quite frankly,” said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, the city’s former police chief, “California is unique.”
This shroud of secrecy over police misconduct is not a distinction of pride for a state that likes to fancy itself a progressive trendsetter. Even red states such as Texas, Kentucky and Utah make officer misconduct records public. At least 10 other states open those records to public view even when the allegations are not substantiated. It’s past time to revise the law. However, it won’t be easy. Unions representing law-enforcement officers up and down the state have served notice that they will fight legislation by state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, that would allow public access to cases involving serious uses of force or wrongdoing.
Leno is well aware of the challenge when law-enforcement groups rise to exert their influence on Sacramento. As a member of the Assembly, he and state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, authored similar legislation after a 2006 state Supreme Court ruling gave an unduly broad interpretation to the 1978 law designed to protect personnel records from public view. Leno and Romero wanted to ensure that the citizenry retained the ability to view disciplinary cases on appeal.
Their legislation kept getting stalled and never reached the governor’s desk.
Leno is back again, with a narroweddown SB1286, and the lift of public concern about police accountability generated by the attention drawn to officerinvolved beatings and shootings caught on video — including the unsettling scene of 26-year-old stabbing suspect Mario Woods being gunned down while surrounded by officers in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood on Dec. 2.
“Clearly, it’s an issue that’s had my attention for many years,” Leno said. “I’ve come to learn in my times in the Legislature, both in San Francisco and Sacramento, that ideas have their time. Given where we are in this national debate ... this is the time.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the unions and their lobbyists-spokespeople are fighting rough, and disingenuously. They are claiming that such transparency would intrude on the officers’ privacy rights by putting their personnel records on display. They also contend that the disclosure of the records would put officers in danger. Wrong and wrong. Gascón, whose department operated under such transparency rules when he was chief in Mesa, Ariz., from 2006 to 2009, said such fears are unwarranted. He said the misconduct of a very few officers can create a “really bad environment” for the majority who are “doing the right thing” — and public confidence in the force is only enhanced when the public knows how and why the wrongdoers are being disciplined.
As for the notion that a transparency law would put officers at risk, Gascón said, “I never saw any of that in Arizona. I never did.”
Legislators who might be inclined to buy the law-enforcement lobby’s scare tactics would be well advised to read SB1286. It states:
The public access would apply only to cases that have been sustained by a department. As Jim Ewert, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, noted: A “relatively small percentage” of complaints against officers is sustained. “This isn’t a gotcha attempt toward cops,” Ewert added. “This is an attempt to provide the public a better understanding of how the investigative process works.” Or, in some cases, does not work.
It would be confined to serious cases of misconduct: lethal use of force, sexual assault, racial or identity profiling, illegal search or seizure, job-related dishonesty or violation of the rights of a member of the public. Disclosure would be limited to content relevant to the misconduct finding: It would not open the door to broader scrutiny of personnel files.
Local governments could decide whether they want to allow the public to attend hearings on appeals in misconduct cases.
As a checkpoint for officer safety, a court could decide to withhold those records if it found a significant danger to an officer or another individual, or if it determined that privacy interests outweighed the public interest in disclosure.
It’s hard to imagine a more reasonable balancing of competing rights. But the law-enforcement representatives are obviously in no mood to compromise, or even acknowledge that transparency is a foundation of trust.
“It’s clear that this legislation was crafted by anti-law-enforcement forces to allow continual second-guessing of the disciplinary process,” George Hofstetter, president of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said in a statement.
But how can Californians have any confidence in those disciplinary appeals processes if they can’t observe their practices and assess the results?
“Our civil society cannot exist or operate without the hard and dangerous work that law enforcement officers do,” Leno said. “If they don’t have the trust of the communities they serve, they cannot do their jobs successfully. Our communities then become less safe. It’s a collaborative relationship.”