A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted an emergency court order Tuesday forbidding the Inglewood Police Department from shredding officer disciplinary files sought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
Judge Dave J. Cowan issued the temporary restraining order preserving police records planned for destruction by the department just days before a new police transparency law goes into effect Jan. 1, expanding the misconduct files subject to public disclosure.
“This is a necessary first step to make sure those records are not destroyed,” said Tiffany Bailey, an ACLU attorney. “But it doesn’t stop here. We now need the city of Inglewood to produce the records that are long past due.”
Since 2019, the ACLU has attempted under a state police transparency law to obtain certain use-of-force and disciplinary records from the Inglewood Police Department, to no avail. Demands by the Southern California News Group for the same documents have been largely ignored by the department as well, although state law requires the agency to hand over the records.
For some 40 years, misconduct among police agencies was a well-guarded secret, protected by law as well as the so-called “peace officers’ bill of rights.” But the tide began to turn in 2018, when lawmakers approved, and the governor signed, Senate Bill 1421, which required law enforcement agencies to publicly disclose some disciplinary records.
Among the documents now public were reports on police shootings, police use of force and sustained incidents of sexual assault and dishonesty.
Another law, Senate Bill 16, was signed by the governor in September and takes effect Jan. 1. It expands the reports available to public disclosure to include unreasonable force, acts of discrimination or bias and failure to intervene against another officer engaging in unreasonable or excessive force, among other things. The records must be turned over within 45 days, unless the police actions took place before Jan. 1, in which case agencies could hold them until Jan. 1, 2023.
Both transparency laws were authored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.
Attorneys for the ACLU theorized that Inglewood planned to destroy records from 58 criminal cases before the new bill goes into effect on Saturday. Inglewood acknowledged that it had shredded police records before the first transparency law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2019.
Attorney Edward Kang, representing Inglewood, did not return a phone message seeking comment.
In court documents, according to City News Service, Inglewood police officials identified records that they felt were unresponsive to the ACLU’s request and could be destroyed on schedule. However, ACLU lawyers said they could not trust the department to police its own records, unilaterally deciding which files were responsive and which were not.
Cowan will consider extending the temporary restraining order on Jan. 18, to a more lengthy preliminary injunction.