Court blocks Inglewood from destroying police disciplinary records | Hacker News Reader

Court blocks Inglewood from destroying police disciplinary records

latimes.com

98 pointsalphabettsy45 comments

I think there is an important word missing from the title, it is Police /Disciplinary/ Records that are being referenced. That is a significant difference and there is a very strong case that these should be retained in exactly the same way criminal records are retained (essentially forever) and for the same purpose - so they can be looked up and referenced should any officer come to attention and a fuller picture of their character is required.

Good point. Done.

Is this the case with criminal records?

There was a rumor that in the Rittenhouse case, one of the other folks involved had a much much larger actual criminal history then the one they released, but that a lot of the history was hidden in various ways?

This was supposedly misinformation but the details were pretty specific, and they seemed to indicate that there might be a method to basically hide past convictions so a full picture would not be available.

Has anyone heard of something called "Expungement"?

Google got me to these guys: https://www.record-clear.com/

They claim even felonies can be removed, even if there are probation violations etc.

>There was a rumor that in the Rittenhouse case, one of the other folks involved had a much much larger actual criminal history then the one they released, but that a lot of the history was hidden in various ways?

As an aside, there's a ~2hr video floating around the internet of bodycam footage from arm guy's DUI arrest between the shooting and the trail. They dropped it, presumably because an active DUI case makes for a crappy prosecution witness. Police officers don't even get treatment that good. If they get as far as being cited (vs a free ride home, which is what they often get) the prosecution typically makes them plead down and spend thousands doing so rather than just dropping it.

That said, the DUI in question is an example of a lot of things that are wrong with policing (the cops in the video are professional and civil the whole time) and I think it's worth watching just for that.

Looks like those guys only handle California. Seems like it's a CA specific law, unsure if available in other states

Most US states have some form of expungement law which allows past criminal records to be cleared. It's mostly intended to help ex-cons with reintegration, because it can be so difficult to get employment (and in many cases voting rights, public services, housing, etc) with a criminal history. Basically criminal records are a major part of the "cycle of criminality" that causes recidivism because former criminals are unable to support themselves by means other than crime (can't get a job, etc), and so expungement policies are expected to have a positive impact on both crime and social welfare. The details all vary from state to state, often there's a limit on how severe of an offense can be expunged, it has to be a certain time in the past, and typically the records are not really "expunged" but removed from public reports---law enforcement and judges can often still see them, as well as federal background checks, and sometimes anyone can ask for a court order to unseal. The expungement itself usually requires a court order, so the court makes a judgment whether or not expungement serves the public interest (i.e. will allow the person to contribute more fully to society). There are a lot of law firms like that that specialize in expungement because there are many people with criminal records and in most cases the process is a pretty straightforward paperwork exercise, so you can make a steady profit stream with a few paralegals preparing form letters.

It becomes a different matter for people who are charged with crimes and otherwise in court, as courts have rules about what criminal history can or cannot be introduced in the court. There's a general principle that a jury shouldn't know about a person's unrelated previous convictions, since it will bias them towards the person being a criminal despite not actually being evidence relevant to the case in question. But I think there are plenty of exceptions, i.e. if the person has been convicted for pretty much the same crime before it can usually be introduced by the prosecution as circumstantial evidence that they apparently have the skills/means/motivation to commit such a crime. But you can't just tell the jury that they have a rap sheet a mile long. I'm not a lawyer and only know so much about this but I believe that usually pretty much the same rules apply to witnesses. You can bring up that a witness has a criminal record if it's somehow directly relevant to their testimony (i.e. they have lied to a court in the past) but you can't just tell the jury that they have a criminal record to try to ruin their reputation. Although it usually fails in practice, the justice system is at least theoretically built around the principle that people can and do change, and so prior criminality shouldn't be held against them if it isn't somehow contributory to the current situation.

To add to this, a lot of times expungement isn't very useful because there are a ton of private companies that scrape these records (including arrest records) constantly. Some of these companies have business models built around conducting background checks and an unfortunate number of them have business models that rely solely on getting people to pay them to "remove" these records.

Yes, this is a big issue! Part of the reason why e.g. California and other states have introduced "ban the box" legislation to restrict employers asking about criminal history, when they already have an expungement process, is because of this issue exactly. Most pre-employment background checks are done through vendors like LexisNexis that pull records at the time of the incident and then retain them permanently, so expungement doesn't do anything. The whole private background check and criminal records industry can be surprisingly sketchy, including behavior that looks to reasonable people like extortion, but it's resisted almost any regulation or oversight. Some of this comes from an inherent tension between public records and personal privacy (are the actions of law enforcement a matter of public interest or a matter of personal privacy? the line can be very blurry), but a lot of it is also just because this industry is politically and financially powerful and any action against it tends to look "soft on crime."

The accused's criminal history comes up more in sentencing than it does in actual criminal cases - in the US system you're being tried on the crime before the court, not anything from your past. There are obvious exceptions - someone who is suspected of murdering their spouse who has prior domestic violence charges is one you see a lot - but in general, that comes up during the sentencing, where the judge has a lot of leeway to tailor the sentence to the circumstances.

Expungement is a thing, but even more importantly in court it’s usually at a judges discretion whether or not evidence is allowed and criminal history is a type of evidence.

Sometimes evidence is not allowed because it is considered prejudicial.

The purpose of a criminal trial is to determine guilt on a specific crime rather than character. That excluded evidence is sometimes allowed at sentencing.

There was controversy in the Rittenhouse case about his prior comments and actions not being allowed into evidence.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2021/09/17/kenosha...

> “This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr. said at the time.

It has become surreal that public officials can get away with blatantly lying these days.

Edit: Interestingly enough, the mayor is not white, which surprised me at first given this stance, but then I found that the mayor came up through law enforcement, was deputy chief in Inglewood, and chief of police in Santa Monica. This is what people talk about when police are viewed as the state-sanctioned gang.

its ACAB spray painted everywhere, not AWCAB, for a reason

the incentive model is broken part, and that incentive model is highly correlated with attracting recruits of different extremes, but its the incentive model under focus

I don't think it should be particularly surprising. Inglewood is 4% white. (Although that percentage is increasing as the city rapidly gentrifies)

For better or for worse people are predisposed to vote for elected officials that have the same ethnicity. I was somewhat surprised when I looked at the neighborhood by neighborhood results from the last California gubernatorial primary. You can use whether a precinct voted for Newsom, Villaraigosa, or Chiang as a pretty good proxy for that area's racial demographics.

Anyways, Butts is mostly known for being a grifter who gives 6 figure jobs to his mistresses and multimillion dollar contracts to his relatives. I think it's just regular corruption, I don't particularly buy the gang argument (although maybe that explains why he drove his SUV over an LAPD officer a few years ago)

Meanwhile, police departments around NY state are just ignoring the requests.

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2021/12/06/n...

It's long been a trope that Police aren't responsive to the citizens they nominally serve, but nowadays they aren't even controlled by the political leaders of their municipalities. Heck, it's not that uncommon to see cops threatening politicians and just ... getting away with it.

It's a rough time when the 2nd Amendment gun nuts start to look prescient.

When did they start to look prescient? 1776? Or was it earlier?

If the standards that were applied to police use of force were applied equally to all people there would be a lot less dubious use of police force.

It’s worth reiterating that police are effectively above the law, criminally and civilly. Aside from the obvious conflicts of interest between police and prosecutors, there is a court invented[0] principle that says that cops are immune to even civil suits if they violate your rights. This can only be breached if the courts had previous ruled that their specific actions[1] violated your rights. Since cops can’t go to trial for new abuses, new precedent isn’t being made and cops are for all intents and purposes immune.

0 - Funny how the anti-“activist judges” crowd is silent about the Supreme Court making this doctrine up out of whole cloth.

1 - Down to the terrain in which the abuse happened.

The article states that this is an issue because they are planning to destroy documents that are part of a request and haven’t released anything since 2019. So same thing in LA it seems.

Hmm. Are they straight up lying here, or am I missing something?

First, “The attached records are no longer required to be retained by law and are not needed for any pending litigation.”

Then, later, "The city of Inglewood said in court declarations that some records requested by the ACLU should be temporarily withheld pending ongoing investigations."

What is the cost of storing public records versus destroying them? I'm betting there isn't really that much of a difference given the main consideration is digital, not space.

Is it? The records date back to 1991. Possibly a lot of them were still paper at that time.

It's not the physical cost, it's the PR cost. A lot of the time the public body doesn't know what is in its files until someone makes a request, then they read the record and realize how many skeletons they have in their closet.

No records = no skeletons; no bad PR. Better to destroy everything all of the time.

The key attribute of these records is disciplinary. Which just so happen to be subject to an unfulfilled freedom of information request.

This is called police corruption.

The cost is likely PR and Legal. Appeals and investigations as a result of what the public might find could be very expensive and/or embarrassing.

There are three costs basically:

- storage, which is pretty darn cheap, easy to predict, easy to budget for, etc..

- retrieval for FOIA, which is easily quantified in workhours and sometimes deferred via fees.

- liability, which is very hard to quantify, considering you never know what skeleton a nosy citizen would be able to uncover.

The latter is mainly the reason public records disappear.

I'm glad most parts of the US are still in the 'let's take this to court' territory. We should be very afraid if we go into the 'an unfortunate accident destroyed all the records' area of dealing with this stuff.

As others have stated for legal liability purposes.

If you werent legally required to store documents or there is a limitation on length, you wouldn't want to continue to store those records.

I work alongside hospital radiology systems.

Large organizations only keep what's required and are looking to purge all else (like deleting mammos after 15 years, pediatrics after 21... Requirements vary state to state in USA).

So if a patient comes suing you with a malpractice in the future, they can say they no longer have the records (as they only kept till legally required).

I doubt they would win a case solely on this but would definately help them.

A vendor created a cloud archive solution for reports/images, with unlimited retention.

Customers (hospital organizations) are demanding features for purging data aka "retention management".

So I bet this happens in all industries/businesses

There is more to the liability than just the threat of malpractice. Holding data of a sensitive nature means you might accidentally leak that data. The more you hold the worse the leak is. Being able to delete that data enables you to somewhat control the blast radius of a leak.

It's not just the non-police record holder's own liability, it's very common to be subpoenaed over a case you're not party to and those can easily turn into expensive fishing expeditions. No excuse for the cops and pretty clearly those requests can be entirely legit, but there are other organizations that have financial reasons to see old records as a liability. One employer that got massive numbers of subpoenas had a business requirement forbidding audit trails and logging because as soon as a lawyer saw any sign of logging they'd go digging. We were never sued, we were just a convenient source of legal ammunition.

https://archive.md/rAgI0

"Rather than destroying them we now store them all together unsorted in a giant box under the water pipe for the building. Hope nothing happens!"

Having police disciplinary records is important for criminal defendants. Sometimes prosecutors keep what is called "Brady Lists" of all the cops who are known liars who should be kept away from the witness stand or else their credibility will be ruined and the prosecutor will lose their case. So prosecutors have tried to keep these lists secret because they need bogus cops as these cops will go to any lengths to convict a person, just like the prosecutor's office.

If the disciplinary records can be destroyed then this is a huge bonus for the government as without them the cops are totally clean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland#Aftermath

In my criminal case, of the two officers that indicted me, one badly beat an unarmed Mexican man who had committed no crime and then lied about it to the investigators saying that the man "ran into the front of the squad car" (luckily the investigators believed the passers-by who testified); the other cop was caught making up fake search warrants to go through people's houses, but managed to wriggle out of the charges and quit the force to avoid anything further. [in the first case the prosecutors have never disclosed the misconduct; in the second they were very proactive in disclosure]

Here's a recent example of this in action:

  ...the racist exchanges have led to the dismissal of at least 85 criminal cases involving the officers implicated in the scandal.
  
  It's possible this hatred and misconduct would never have been exposed. But two officers apparently felt untouchable enough that they felt comfortable spray-painting a swastika on a vehicle they towed following a report of mail theft.
  
  Several of those officers have been investigated for deploying excessive force or killing citizens. In almost every case, they've been cleared of wrongdoing.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211212/15551548112/calif...

Excerpt from another article on the same events, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-08/torrance...

> In the Mitchell case, that could be especially concerning. According to district attorney’s records reviewed by The Times, Concannon once sent a troubling text message referring to a deposition he gave in an “officer-involved shooting.”

> “They believed our lies. Good job sticking to the script,” he wrote. “LMAO, that’s what they call a W.”

> According to a Times review of public records, Concannon has shot only one person during his career: Christopher DeAndre Mitchell.

Referring to this case, where it was found to be "lawful self-defense": https://da.lacounty.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/JSID_OIS_10_...

Obviously this is totally inconclusive and in no way proves Concannon's guilt, but note the obstruction of the bodycam for the crucial moments:

> In the body worn footage, Concannon appeared to move slightly back along the side of the car as he put away his flashlight. Concannon’s left hand can be seen coming up to brace his firing hand on the service weapon. After the shift to a two-handed firing position, the body worn camera’s view of Mitchell was obstructed by Concannon’s hands. As a result, Mitchell is not visible on the body worn footage during the three seconds preceding the first shot. Concannon can be heard on the video repeating the command, “Get out of the car!” more forcefully during this interval. About one second after repeating that command, the first shot was fired.

Trying to get a prosecution against a cop is almost impossible. For starters, the primary body you must report a crime by a cop to is the police station where he works, as generally they will have jurisdiction over the issue. And they are going to laugh you out of the station. What's your next move? Go to the prosecutor and complain? ROFL.

Believe me, I've tried all of these avenues. I should scan the letters I've received from these agencies, they're hilarious. Basically they'll come back and say that they have a policy of not investigating crimes by their officers and officers from other jurisdictions. I've even taken this through the courts. If the crime was committed as part of an investigation into a suspected crime, then the courts ruled that it is acceptable and not actionable.

The news articles you see where the cops actually got indicted are the million-to-ones. Even Kim Foxx (State's Attorney for Cook County - i.e. Chicago) has stated in interviews that even if she gets an indictment against a cop, getting a conviction is almost impossible.

While this is only a partial solution, a number of cities throughout the US have adopted or are adopting a model usually called "civilian oversight" in which complaints of misconduct by police officers can be directed to a separate, independent police oversight body. The police oversight body is separated from law enforcement by an administrative firewall and usually restricts any of its staff being former law enforcement officers to further improve separation (common sources of staff are insurance, personnel security, and litigation investigators). While criminal enforcement is a judicial matter and not one of administrative oversight, there's usually a perception that civilian oversight helps to bring information to light that might motivate a DA or other prosecutor to pursue the case.

This is only a half-measure at best but it's something that is gaining traction, and you might be able to push for it in your area.

I live in Chicago. We're onto our THIRD police oversight agency here. "COPA replaced the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA, which had been discredited in the aftermath of the McDonald revelations, and which, in its own turn, had in 2007 replaced the Office of Professional Standards, or OPS, in the midst of an earlier police scandal."

They replace the agency every few years. There'll be another new one in a couple of years. They'll fire all the staff who, as you say, are not supposed to be related to the police, but who are all actually related to the police, and then rehire them all to the new agency.

An officer in my case, who has previously been found to have lied in an investigation where he beat an unarmed Mexican man, lied to the grand jury to obtain an indictment against me which resulted in my imprisonment for many years. I tried to report him to COPA and they just disappear the complaint each time. It's like you hand the complaint to them and ask them for a receipt and they are like "What complaint? Who are you? Why are you in our office? Please leave before we call security." I've tried and tried and never got a response. If I wasn't on house arrest I would just chain myself to a fixture in their building until police had to remove me.

Most states have zero or minimal statutes requiring document retention by public bodies. I know several times I have requested documents from public bodies only to have them immediately throw them in the garbage so that they do not have to disclose them.

I even took this to the appellate courts at one point as the argument was whether documents in the garbage are still in the possession of the public body. They said they weren't, I said they were. Courts ruled with the public body.

(One of my arguments was also that they can put them in the garbage at the time of the request, write the denial letter, and then pull them back out of the garbage)

most states absolutely do have document retention schedules for state/municipal agencies.

US municipal police departments require a lot more change before they are going to start achieving their stated missions.

Depending on your perspective, they are achieving their stated missions, quite successfully. They do not specify who they are protecting and serving, but there is certainly a class of people who are quite well protected and served by police.

A police force without transparency is as good as a politician who doesn't want equal opportunity voting. These are not people that represent my best interests. It is being irritating that the bodies of our country that are intended to support, represent and carry us are the same ones that try to tear us down and hold us back from prospering.

As a general rule, the truth of moral-institutional declarations by public figures is inversely proportional to their frequency and fervency.

As I've gotten older, my conclusion is all people are just people. Not all Doctors are best in class, some are shit. Not all politicians want to be there for the good of people, and maybe some do.

Overall everyone is on a spectrum of really extremes with most falling in the middle. It does seem the outliers are the ones that society props up and puts in the lime light. Idk, maybe I'm jaded but sometimes I look at this and sort of laugh that we have not blown this planet up yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com