California Police Department Wants Five Days Notice And The Personal Info Of Requesters Before Turning Over Misconduct Records

from the another-set-of-extra-rights dept

The thing California cops never thought would happen happened. On January 1, 2019, a new law took effect that opened up police misconduct and use of force records to the public for the first time in ever. Needless to say, cops were not pleased.

Multiple lawsuits were filed in an attempt to block the law from taking effect -- or at least prevent the public from accessing records created prior to January 2019. Multiple lawsuits and legal challenges were rejected by California courts, which read the law as being retroactive.

As those efforts failed, the state's district attorney, Xavier Becerra, decided to go against the courts and the law's author to claim it was not retroactive. Of course, he was no more correct about this than the law enforcement unions being handed losses by the state's courts.

The "smart" law enforcement agencies read the writing on the wall, took the wall down, and ran it through the shredder before the law took effect. There were a few cooperative standouts following the law's enactment, but most law enforcement agencies decided to comply with the new law as antagonistically and slowly as possible.

The Long Beach Police Department is the latest to flip the bird to the public over public records. As Tony Saavedra of the Orange County Register reports, the PD is preemptively buying time. Or, more accurately, it's hoping to steal it. What the PD wants is nearly a week's-worth of heads up if the city plans to release officers' misconduct and use of force records.

Long Beach police officers want five days advance notice before the city releases their individual misconduct and use-of-force records to the public under a new state transparency law.

The city, being the subservient ass it is, has acquiesced. And it's made this five-day advance notice policy even worse.

City contract negotiators have recommended the notification provision, along with the requirement that officers receive the names of individuals and organizations requesting their files.

How's that for a chilling effect? Officers whose files have been requested will know who has been requesting their files. That's going to make things uncomfortable for requesters, who may suddenly find themselves interacting with law enforcement officers far more often than they'd like to.

The boss of the local police union has of course showed up to say something stupid in defense of this heinous bullshit.

James Foster, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Association, said the provision is merely an effort to even the field for police officers.

Foster said officers often don’t know the contents of the administrative investigations done on them.

“It would be grossly unfair for the officer to see this for the first time on the front page of the newspaper,” he said.

"Even the playing field?" Your guys have badges, guns, and a whole lot of power. The playing field is nowhere close to even. Accessing public records doesn't suddenly put citizens on equal footing with people with the force of the law behind them. Let's see how well a cop responds to a citizen stopping him for no reason, insisting the officer explain where he's going, what he's doing, and why he's in such a shady neighborhood, all while checking the contents of his pockets and groin area. Let's see a peace officer sit through a pretextual traffic stop while the citizen kills time with probing questions in hopes of getting a free pass on a vehicle search, with or without Officer Paws and his magical nose.

And, if officers are concerned about appearing on the front page of the newspaper, maybe they shouldn't engage in the sort of misconduct that creates paper trails. Just a suggestion.

This is a bad policy and it's bad news for Californians. No doubt other police unions are asking for the same special treatment, hoping to deter people from obtaining records they're now allowed to obtain.

Filed Under: california, long beach, long beach pd, misconduct, police, transparency, xavier becerra

California Police Officers Used Self-Destructing Messaging App For Years

from the TigerText-also-destroys-reputations! dept

The Long Beach Police Department has bravely struck a blow against police accountability. An investigation by Al Jazeera uncovered use of self-deleting messaging by the department.

Current and former officers from the Long Beach Police Department in Southern California have told Al Jazeera that their police-issued phones had Tiger Text installed on them.

The Tiger Text app is designed to erase text messages after a set time period. Once the messages have been deleted, they cannot be retrieved - even through forensic analysis of the phone.

The police officers who spoke with Al Jazeera said the confidential messaging system was used to share details of police operations and sensitive personnel issues.

This may be true. But even if this was the full extent of TigerText usage, it's still a problem. Personnel issues can become matters of public interest, especially in civil rights lawsuits. Details of police operations are normally inaccessible to the public, but in rare cases, these too become matters of public interest.

On top of that, there's a good possibility some of these vanished discussions may have been pertinent to criminal trials. Defendants should have the chance to obtain relevant discussions that may help their defense, but Tiger Text ensures information that prosecutors might be obligated to turn over to the defense is now completely inaccessible.

In fact, the Al-Jazeera article quotes two former officers as claiming their superiors told them to use TigerText specifically to prevent conversations from being discoverable. The department has denied giving officers these instructions, but former officers claim the PD's participation in the discovery process is anything but "on the up and up."

The Long Beach PD had more than 100 officers using TigerText to preemptively destroy possible public records and/or evidence. The use of self-destructing messages, if nothing else, violates record preservation laws. Depending on what disappeared into the ether, there's a good chance criminal cases were also affected by the rolling destruction of communications.

It didn't take long for the Long Beach PD to reverse course after having its shady texting exposed. The LA Times reports the department has already officially ditched TigerText.

The Long Beach Police Department has suspended its use of a mobile texting application that permanently erases messages after civil liberties advocates and media outlets raised concerns that the app could be used to hide evidence useful to the other side in criminal and civil court cases.

In a statement, the city said the decision to halt the use of TigerText came “pending further review of whether the use is consistent with the city’s record retention policy and administrative regulations for the use of mobile devices.”

The PD claims it used TigerText as a stopgap solution when it moved away from Blackberry phones. Supposedly the search for an encrypted messaging system led the LBPD to this program, despite there being plenty of other options on the market in 2014. I guess the built-in autodelete feature was a pleasant bonus. TigerText was originally developed for the medical industry to allow care providers to send sensitive patient information to each other. The self-destruct feature helped hospitals comply with HIPAA regulations -- both by encrypting communications and ensuring records no longer needed were removed from issued phones.

To its credit, the swift abandonment of TigerText means future violations will be minimal. The PD has also promised to release more info about the department's utilization of the messaging app, including which officers and commanders used the app. But the damage that has been done probably can't be undone. If no messages were archived, the last four years of TigerText communications no longer exist. Nothing can be proven one way or another and taxpayers who paid $10,000 a year to help the PD destroy public records will just have to take the department's word that nothing illegal or unconstitutional occurred while TigerText was in use. That's a giant leap of faith most people won't make. If the Long Beach PD didn't have a trust issue before, it definitely has one now.

Filed Under: disappearing messages, evidence, long beach, long beach police department, police, public records, transparency
Companies: tiger text

ACLU Sues Los Angeles Police For Harassing Photographers For Taking Photos With No Apparent Aesthetic Value

from the hope-their-lawyers-have-aesthetic-value dept

Remember how the Long Beach police defended their decision to detain photographers if they believed whatever they were photographing had "no aesthetic value?" Well, it seems that the ACLU took notice of that. Neppe alerts us to the news that the Los Angeles sheriff's department has been sued by some photographers and the ACLU for its activities in harassing photographers. The specific claims are violations of both the 1st and 4th Amendments. Should be an interesting case to watch, especially for photographers, who are increasingly harassed these days.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, free speech, long beach, los angeles, photographs
Companies: aclu

Police Say They Can Detain Photographers If Their Photographs Have 'No Apparent Esthetic Value'

from the police-as-art-critics dept

Apparently the police in Long Beach, California, have a policy that says if a police officer determines that a photographer is taking photos of something with "no apparent esthetic value," they can detain them. This revelation came after photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff was taking the following photo: The police officer somehow determined that there couldn't be esthetic value there, and thus, the photographer had to be detained and checked out. The police are defending this policy, saying that while officers don't have any specific training in what qualifies as "apparent esthetic value," they will stop anyone photographing things they don't consider to be something a "regular tourist" would photograph. I actually have to go down to Long Beach next month for a speaking engagement, and I'm now tempted to take a bunch of photographs that have "no apparent esthetic value."

Filed Under: cameras, long beach, photographs, police