Police should follow public records law
Police work is different from other work.
It’s more dangerous. It requires more split-second decisions. Those in the job encounter bad guys wreaking havoc. They help out the rest of us in our times of need.
Officers’ personnel records also are of a different order than the rest of us. Some of their work — undercover — has to be confidential. It’s wrong to ever publish their addresses or phone numbers; each one of them has arrested bad guys, some of whom seek revenge.
But when police officers use potentially deadly force, and when that force hurts innocent bystanders — or anyone, really — state laws in California give the press and thus the citizenry the right to know at least some of the basics of what happened.
And an investigation published last week by the Sacramento Bee shows that the actions of officers who fired their weapons in police-involved shootings are often completely covered up, and that any discipline they faced over even truly bad shootings is almost never released to the public.
“California is one of the worst states in the country on police transparency,” attorney David Loy of the First Amendment Coalition told the Bee. “It’s a little bit better after SB 1421 and 16,” legislation that attempted to make police in the state more transparent. “But if it’s still not a completely black hole it’s a pretty dark hole … There’s all kinds of ways the system can still be gamed to promote secrecy in law enforcement. It’s a totally different standard than other public employees.”
The Bee story focused on resident Nia Love, who more than three years ago was shot in the eye with a rubber bullet after attending a demonstration against the murder of George Floyd. She was in fact walking away from the demonstration toward her home when the projectile hit her in the eye, in which she is now blind.
Love “is still waiting to learn the name of the officer who shot her in the eye with a rubber bullet, and whether that officer faced discipline for that action,” the Bee reports.
“Honestly I think it’s disrespectful to me and anybody else that has sustained these injuries, any kind of injury from the police,” said Love, 33.
Senate Bill 1421 requires police in California to release documents related to shootings and other uses of force that cause “severe injury” or “great bodily injury.”
Maddeningly, a weird interpretation on what severe injury means is the excuse police departments are using when they don’t release records about shootings.
“If someone requires surgery, I think there’s no question that’s substantial” injury by the law enforcement we hire to protect us, the attorney, Loy, says.
And the loss of sight in one eye and the surgeries she needed to have is apparently not “severe” enough for the Sacramento Police Department.
Love said hearing that Floyd protesters’ injuries were not seen as severe enough to warrant transparency was hurtful.
“We have to go through these surgeries, have to live through these life altering injuries,” Nia Love said. “To not be considered great bodily harm, I think, is a slap in the face.”
She’s already had the slap in the face, a mighty powerful one, even though attending a demonstration is not a crime, and Love was never accused by police of committing one before they shot her.
Even when Sacramento police do release records, they sometimes hold back “hundreds of pages, “ the Bee reports, and “typically include just one sentence that says an official in the law enforcement agency, or its use of force review board, has looked into the incident and found the officer or deputy acted within the policy.”
Californians, and the news organizations that report for them, need to press police agencies across the state to comply with the law and release records whenever there is an officer-involved shooting or any police actions leading to what any reasonable person would call great bodily injury, whether or not officers are disciplined.