Two victories for government transparency

Advocates of governmental transparency have scored two recent wins in their perpetual battles with California’s political officials.

One victory, a May 28 state Supreme Court ruling, is especially timely since it stemmed from the fatal police shootings of two unarmed black men in 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City.

There were demonstrations of protest across the country about the deaths of Brown and Garner, including one in Berkeley.

The Hayward Police Department provided what’s called “mutual aid” to Berkeley police in dealing with the demonstration and afterwards, the National Lawyers Guild submitted a request, under the California Public Records Act, to Hayward officials for video footage from body cameras that their officers wore.

Hayward charged the Lawyers Guild just $1 for each DVD containing body camera video, but also $3,246 for staff time in redacting confidential information from about seven hours of recording.

That extra charge led to a lawsuit that wound up in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the city was wrong in claiming that redaction was the same as “data extraction,” for which it could legally charge.

The ruling came down three days after the suffocation death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman’s knee on his neck, igniting waves of protest that continue. It will affect the inevitable demands for police body camera recordings from those demonstrations.

The second win for transparency occurred in the Capitol last week, when legislators proposing to change legislative procedures for emergency situations backed off in the face of criticism.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 25 would allow the Legislature to operate by remote control whenever the governor or president had declared an emergency, such as the current one for COVID-19.

Legislators could vote electronically from outside the Capitol, votes could be cast by proxy, the public could be excluded from legislative meetings, and videotaping of legislative proceedings, with rapid access by the public, could be suspended “if compliance is not practicable…”

The sponsors of the voterapproved constitutional requirement for videotaping and other transparency procedures, former Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee and Stanford University physicist Charles Munger Jr., raised a stink about the measure, saying it “guts transparency.” Sponsors of ACA 25 retreated, dropping provisions for suspending videotaping and barring the public.

There remains, however, one bit of troubling language in ACA 25. The Legislature could still invoke its procedures when an emergency is proclaimed “within the state, or parts thereof,” which could mean just in one county.

That may appear to be a minor point, but legislative history tells us that officials will exploit any procedural loophole to do what they want to do. ACA 25 needs one more tweak to be acceptable.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for over half a century, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers starting in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times in Eureka, while still attending high school. He can be reached at dan@calmatters. org.