Journalists get a list of police officers who have been convicted of serious crimes, the state Attorney General threatens jail for possession of the list, and so the journalists publish the list online in a searchable format:
The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who've been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.Good.
This collaboration of multiple newsrooms and journalism advocates began with an unforced error by a state agency. Taking advantage of a new state law allowing the public to access police misconduct records, journalists asked the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for relevant documents. The agency handed over a list of 12,000 former and current officers -- a list that apparently was never supposed to be made public.
The state's Attorney General claimed the journalists had broken the law simply by possessing a document the Commission never should have given them. This couldn't be further from the truth, but AG Xavier Becerra continued to make this claim, as though it were possible to codify something just by saying it out loud often enough.
I can see why AG Becerra wants this list buried. There's nothing on it that makes cops or their oversight (which includes Becerra) look good. While the 12,000 officers in the database are a small percentage of the total number of California law enforcement officers employed over the past ten years, this small portion includes a number of cops who were never fired from their agencies despite committing criminal acts that would have put regular people out of a job.
0 comments :
Post a Comment