‘All we get is secrecy’
When police misconduct occurs, the records often stay confidential. One mom aims to change that.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – Leticia de la Rosa sat impatiently in the hospital lobby, desperate to find out if her son was still alive.
Hours before, a relative spotted what looked like her son’s Jeep in a TV news story about a police shooting. De la Rosa arrived on the scene and burst past the police tape, demanding to know the name of the man who had been shot and where he had been taken.
The officers ignored her questions. They told her to step back beyond the police line.
In an emotional fog, she and her sister drove to the nearest medical facility. No one had any information.
Hours went by as she battled rage, fear and uncertainty. She prayed for God to deliver good news about her 22year-old son.
“I kept asking anyone I saw, ‘Did they bring someone in, a young Mexican American man?’ But no one could tell me anything because it was an officer-involved shooting,” de la Rosa, 54, says, recalling that night in 2014.
“Finally, the coroner came out, and I had to identify him by a tattoo,” she says, wiping away a tear. “That’s how I found out he was dead.”
De la Rosa says she learned later that one officer who was assigned to stay with her son’s body played with it, moving James de la Rosa’s head to see if it would move back and tickling the corpse’s toes.
Bakersfield police rallied behind the four officers in the shooting. De la Rosa retained attorney Mark Geragos to sue the police department, learning that some of the officers in her son’s shooting had been involved in other shootings of civilians.
“State law shields police officer records, and families like mine rarely get answers to the questions we ask,” de la Rosa says. “All we get is secrecy.”
Police “never showed any compassion,” she says.
De la Rosa made a fierce commitment to social change. Furious about the way she says she was treated, she worked with other families whose relatives were killed by police to push for the passage of California’s Senate Bill 1421, which as of Jan. 1 overrides decades of precedent and requires police departments to open internal investigation records related to deadly force and police wrongdoing. The law could inspire change in departments where the relationship with the public is fraught with tension after fatal shootings involving people of color.
Battle over conduct records
California is not the only state where records documenting the conduct of police were kept from public view, sometimes by local decision makers and sometimes by state law.
A USA TODAY investigation found examples across the U.S. of powerful forces working to keep records about law enforcement officers’ conduct secret. Those forces include police departments and their officers’ unions, state agencies created to oversee police, legislators, prosecutors and judges.
Journalists representing more than 100 USA TODAY Network newsrooms spent more than a year using state open records laws to collect public records about police conduct from thousands of police departments, local governments, prosecutors and state oversight agencies.
Dozens of police agencies ignored repeated requests made under states’ open records laws. Other agencies denied requests, saying sharing the information with the public would violate officers’ privacy rights or would not be in the public’s best interest.
Even state agencies assigned to oversee law enforcement officers frequently refused to release the reasons why they acted to decertify certain officers – effectively banning them from the profession in their states.
Delaware wouldn’t release the names of officers it banned at all – making it the only state to deny that request. The state doesn’t report the identity of its decertified officers to the national clearinghouse some police agencies use to screen new hires, effectively hiding that information from potential employers in 49 states.
New York, Michigan, Oklahoma and several other states wouldn’t release the identities of any police officers, saying that because some of them could be working undercover, releasing information posed a threat.
Though hundreds of police departments across the country released disciplinary records, many did not. Others so severely redacted them as to render them nearly useless.
In state after state, USA TODAY had to employ the assistance of its lawyers to gain access to the public records – a resource that citizens walking in the door searching for public information often don’t have.
The records that USA TODAY Network and its partners are gathering are being published – and made searchable – to give the public an opportunity to examine their police department and the broader issue of police misconduct.
From firearm use to sexual assault
Police officers say civilians have no way of understanding the pressures and dangers inherent in their daily work. Given the often violent and deadly nature of the job, records about officers are kept secret, police unions say, to protect officers – and their families – from retaliation and harassment.
Law enforcement critics argue a culture of self-interested silence protects officers whose conduct is suspect or illegal.
The culture of secrecy in California dates back to the 1970s, when the Los Angeles Police Department, upset that past complaints against them were showing up in court cases, purged three decades of officer files.
The state Legislature responded in 1978 by passing a law mandating that records be preserved while ensuring that access to those documents by the public would be difficult to come by.
SB 1421, or “Peace Officers: Release of Records,” is aimed at making police records accessible to the public and officers accountable to the community.
Specifically, it lets the public leverage the California Public Records Act to unseal internal investigation material in any incident when a firearm was discharged by a peace officer; when use of force resulted in injury or death; when sexual assault by police on civilians was reported; and when an officer was suspected of lying on police reports.
The accessible evidence can include recordings of incidents or interviews, autopsy reports and correspondence with officials on disciplinary actions.
The law is generating pushback. Ronald Lawrence, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, says some departments remain hesitant to comply with the law because for decades, releasing information about police officers was illegal and could draw lawsuits from officers.
“It’s not like we’re trying to stonewall; we’re just proceeding with an abundance of caution as the law gets sorted out,” says Lawrence, who serves as police chief of Citrus Heights, a town of 80,000 near Sacramento.
Lawrence says most police officers “perform admirably daily,” and the new police transparency law will “demonstrate that we do have a strong system of accountability, up to and including termination. We are human and make mistakes, but very few officers tarnish the flag.”
Nancy Skinner, a state senator from Berkeley who introduced SB 1421, says, “Sunshine is a great disinfectant,” noting that complying with the law should benefit departments.
“For law enforcement to do their job, they need the community’s trust,” Skinner says. “When you block access to information from the public, that trust will not be there.”
‘Like a bomb went off’
When James de la Rosa was a little boy, police officers were not the scourge of his community. In fact, his mother says, he wanted to be one.
“But then as he grew up and saw the way some of his friends were treated, how some were killed, he changed his mind,” Leticia de la Rosa says. “But at his core, he was a peacemaker.”
Over the years, de la Rosa pieced together what happened to her son that fatal night five years ago:
Toward the end of a night out, James stopped at a gas station about a mile from the family home.
Spotting police cars, he got nervous and left. Police pursued his Jeep Liberty, which crashed a few minutes later. James got out of the car with his hands up, then police perceived that he dropped one arm toward his waistband. Officers, feeling threatened, opened fire, killing him. No weapon was found.
“James was 6 foot and 360 pounds most of his life, but in the last year of his life, he had become a gym rat and lost 100 pounds, so I think he was just pulling up his pants when he reached down, because most of his clothes were too big,” Leticia de la Rosa says. “It’s not fair. He should still be here.”
For many in the family, James’ passing hit hard.
“It was like a bomb went off in our family,” Leticia says, sitting in her living room, which is filled with framed photos and collages featuring James. The hard hat he wore on his oil rig job is prominently displayed.
Athena Rodriguez, 15, one of James’ cousins, says she feels for any family that might go through what her family had to endure.
“The last time I saw him, that night he died, he just said, ‘You’re beautiful, and I love you,’ ” Rodriguez says. “It hurts to think about every day, knowing they won’t be back. And it hurts to think that other families have to go through this.”
Leticia de la Rosa made her way to the state Capitol in Sacramento where she and others shared their stories with lawmakers, an outreach that helped Skinner get the legislative votes necessary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown to sign SB 1421 into law in September.
De la Rosa didn’t expect to ever be in the spotlight in her lifetime.
But, she says, “the police messed with the wrong family, and I’m not going away because I’m here for him.”
“For law enforcement to do their job, they need the community’s trust.” California state Sen. Nancy Skinner