At the time, records retention laws gave agencies the right to destroy complaint records that were more than five years old. Among the cities named by Skinner were Downey and Morgan Hill, whose representatives told the Howard Center the records were destroyed according to the cities’ retention schedule.
Skinner introduced her second bill, which became law in 2022, to broaden the types of police transparency records available to the public and to address some of the issues and confusion resulting from her first piece of legislation. The law expanded the categories of public information to include excessive use-of-force cases, as well as unlawful searches and arrests, failures to intervene against other officers who use unreasonable force, and cases in which police officers showed discrimination against certain people based on race, religion, sex or disability.
The law requires agencies to maintain complaints and any related reports or findings for at least five years if the complaints are determined to be unfounded — and at least 15 years if the findings are confirmed. The law also set a 45-day deadline for agencies to produce requested police records.
But current law also states that records don’t need to be released for “pending” or “active” investigations, a provision experts say some agencies use to delay disclosure continually.
More recently, state lawmakers approved a measure that added other obstacles for people seeking records related to police misconduct.
A 2023 law made California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training exempt from disclosing records related to officers’ personnel files, misconduct records and other investigative materials of decertification cases. The state previously had required the commission to make those records public.
Now, through Jan. 1, 2027, the commission is forwarding such requests back to the officer’s department, essentially giving the decision to release records back to the local agencies that the release of any negative information could hurt. Civil rights and open government advocates had opposed the measure, arguing it would “deny promised transparency into the decertification process” and “take the state backward with respect to law enforcement transparency.”
When records aren’t specifically made disclosable by the new laws, agencies look to other state laws to determine whether to release officers’ records.
The Public Records Act, California’s body of law that covers the release of government information, gives law enforcement agencies broad latitude to keep records confidential based on their judgment that releasing the information “would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
This story was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Howard Center is an initiative of the Scripps Howard Fund in honor of the late news industry executive and pioneer Roy W. Howard. Contact us at howardcenter@asu.edu or on X (formerly Twitter)@HowardCenterASU.