California Governor: Hey, Let’s Try To Save A Few Bucks By Making Cops Less Accountable

We, as a nation, spend hundreds of billions every year to ensure law enforcement agencies are staffed well enough to provide, at best, semi-competent service. We spend billions every year on lawsuit settlements generated by officers who can't even manage to provide semi-competent service without violating constitutional rights.

You get what you pay for, they say. Whoever they" were said this without peeping law enforcement agency budgets, which far outpace the value generated by these services. A huge part of the spending problem isn't necessarily the spending. It's the lack of transparency and accountability that is paired with massive amounts of money and power.

The entire state of California used to be plagued by this problem. Up until 2019, police misconduct records were officially treated like Sanskrit combined with Fort Knox. The records were locked up tight and whatever might be released would be completely inscrutable. A bill passed in 2018 changed this. Suddenly, California law enforcement agencies were required to turn over these records to requesters.

This should have changed everything. Instead, cop shops went to ground, tossing records into shredders, burn barrels, etc. before they could be turned over to the public. Others went over the top, attempting to preserve their opacity through lawsuits. Most of the latter efforts failed. The former efforts - the wanton destruction of records - were far more successful.

The government of California is now trying to figure out how it can fund all the things it needs to fund. For some reason - only a few years after making police more accountable to the public - Governor Gavin Newsom is suggesting police accountability should be one of the first things to go now that times are tight.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration has proposed an end to public disclosure of investigations of abusive and corrupt police officers, handing the responsibility instead to local agencies in an effort to help cover an estimated $31.5 billion budget deficit.

Now, this isn't exactly what the new law did. But it's tied to it. The public records reform passed in 2018 led to another accountability effort passed in 2021. That law, which made public disclosure of officer decertification investigations performed by the state's Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission mandatory, is what Newsom wants to take off the state's bottom line.

This would place the responsibility for disclosure on local agencies - agencies that have far less funding (in most cases) than state agencies. Local agencies are also far less likely to be proactive in disclosing ongoing or completed investigations of their officers. This will likely lead to even more public records litigation, placing the ultimate financial burden on public records requesters, who have even less funding than local agencies. Not only that, but taxpayers will be expected to foot the bill to defend police agencies in lawsuits where they've decided not to follow the mandate dumped into their laps by Governor Newsom.

Here's the person-to-person impact, as stated by none other than another government official:

Removing the transparency element from the 2021 law would continue eroding public trust, Antioch Mayor Pro Tem Tamisha Torres-Walker said. The city, 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of San Francisco, was shaken after a federal investigation found more than half of the officers in the Antioch police force were in a group text where some officers freely used racial slurs and bragged about fabricating evidence and beating suspects.

To say, go to the very people who commit the crimes against your community and ask them to reveal themselves to you so that you can hold them accountable,' I don't think that's a fair process," Torres-Walker said.

That's what often goes overlooked when transparency and accountability laws get gutted or revamped in the wrong direction. It's not just journalists and accountability activists seeking access to these records. It's also people whose rights have been violated. They have a direct interest in frictionless access to these same records. This abdication of responsibility by the state will have a direct negative effect on taxpayers that aren't going to get cut a check by the state just because the state found a convenient way to offload part of its $31.5 billion deficit.

And no one is willing to say how much this will save, so no one on this side of the government even knows if this offloading of accountability will do anything more than free the Commission from having to perform on-demand delivery of cop-related bad news.

Neither the governor's office nor the commission shared how much money the state could save under the proposal.

There's the apparent advantage: an unknown amount of savings might contribute to eating away at a $31.5 billion shortfall - a shortfall that likely to be followed by annual shortfalls for the rest of eternity. And even if the state finds itself closer to being in the black, it will never give this money back to the Commission and resume providing better access to misconduct investigations. That's just the way the government works. Governments don't take money from stuff they want to fully fund. And once they've taken money away from the things they consider to be unimportant, those things are abandoned forever.