SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration is trying to exempt itself from sharing information about bad cops. Now the ACLU and a list of other organizations are calling on the governor to reverse that language in his budget before Thursday’s deadline.
The commission that oversees the decertification process, known as POST, said the public can still request information on law enforcement officers at the local level. The organizations who helped create the law said that defeats the entire purpose.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 2 into law in 2021 to strip law enforcement officers found guilty of wrongdoing of their badges.
At the time, California was one of only a few states that didn’t have a decertification process.
“Newsom, you need to do what's right," Jay Vasquez with Communities United For Restorative Justice said. "You signed a certain bill because you agreed with the content that was in there. Now to come back, what a year and a half later to dismantle a huge piece of that bill, transparency piece, it's a shame.”
The governor’s proposed budget includes language that would exempt POST from disclosing the personnel files.
POST told Political Reporter Morgan Rynor in May that it’s expensive to fulfill those public records requests, and local police departments can and should handle that.
“I don't think that it's a fair statement to say, 'go to the very people who commit the crimes against you and your community, and ask them to reveal themselves to you so that you can hold them accountable'," Tamisha Torres-Walker said. "I don't think that there's a fair process, and I think that the governor and our legislators need to fulfill the promise of this bill.”
Tamisha Torres-Walker is an Antioch City Councilmember.
The Antioch Police Department made headlines recently as officers were accused of using racial slurs, making racist jokes and sharing racist memes.
“Had the records related to the investigation not been made public this scandal would have never been uncovered," Torres-Walker said, "and the criminal acts demonstrated by the Antioch Police Department and other neighboring law enforcement agencies would have gone unchecked and continue to target and harm black and brown members of our community.”
The groups also have a big issue with the way this was done, quietly in the budget instead of going through the typical policy proposal path where there is more public debate.
"When trailer bill language is hijacked, and the processes is used instead to implement the kinds of policy that you would not be able to move through policy committee, It is wrong," she said.
The groups said they did have a meeting with the governor’s administration and they echoed what we were already told: Fulfilling public records requests is timely and costly.