In 2021, William Gude—the fearless LAPD critic who goes by “Film The Police LA” on social media—filed a public records request for information about officers assigned to the Community Safety Partnership Bureau (CSPB).
Five years later, he’s still waiting for the LAPD to hand over all of the responsive documents that the department has identified.
Gude is interested in the records because when the Community Safety Partnership Bureau was created, the LAPD “billed it as being made up of 100 handpicked officers with superb records,” he tells me. The Community Safety Partnership program is an initiative that embeds LAPD officers in housing projects, the South Park neighborhood and several other locations.
“I filed a request to get personnel records of serious misconduct by these handpicked officers in the CSPB,” he says. “Here we are more than five years later and they still haven't completed the request.”
According to Gude, the LAPD has released some of the records over the years, but not all of them.
“They've been sending them in bits,” he says. “But it shouldn't take this long.”
Earlier in the day, during yesterday’s weekly Police Commission meeting, Gude addressed the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners and LAPD top brass before the department gave a presentation on outstanding public records requests.
“You guys are doing a CPRA [California Public Records Act] report today,” Guide said in a thundering voice during the public comment portion of the meeting. “I just want to tell you, it's completely broken. And it's by design.”
“It is designed to be slow,” he said.
Under the California Public Records Act (CPRA), agencies must respond to public records requests within 10 days. Agencies can extend that deadline by 14 days. But there is generally no requirement to produce responsive records within a certain timeline.
That means records requesters are at the mercy of the agencies that people seek records from. Apart from pestering the agencies with follow up emails and/or filing a lawsuit (which can take months or years to litigate), there aren’t many tools available to get them to respond to requests faster.
Since 2020, I’ve filed over 80 public records requests with the LAPD, according to my records. And like William Gude, I’ve waited years for the LAPD to send me records that I requested.
For example, in 2020, I requested body-worn camera footage from an LAPD officer who shot and killed a man at a Hollywood 24 Hour Fitness back in 2018. As well as body-worn camera footage from the officer’s partner and other officers who responded to the scene.
Six years later, my request is still open and the LAPD hasn’t produced one single second of body camera footage. In that time, the LAPD has sent me dozens of messages telling me that the records would be produced by a certain deadline. But when those deadlines came, they pushed it back further.
Currently, the LAPD expects to produce the records “on or before October 13” of this year. That would be 2,050 days after I made my initial request!
In recent years, The LAPD has seen a sharp increase in the annual number of public records requests submitted to them, according to an LAPD report.
In 2020, they received about 3,600 total requests, the report says. Last year, they received more than 8,000 requests.
As the number of public records requests has steadily increased, the number of staff members who work on those requests has decreased substantially. The LAPD currently has 18 staff members assigned to the two units that handle public records requests for the department.
Previously, in 2021, they had 27 staff members assigned to the units. Notably, there’s been a significant reduction in the number of “management analysts.”
“They're the ones that are searching for the request, they're communicating with a requester, they're doing most of the legwork," Javier Sanchez, the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Risk Management and Legal Affairs Division, told the Board of Police Commissioners. “That's the backbone of the operation.”
Requests have been made to double the number of staff working on public records requests, according to Lieutenant Rick Hernandez. But the department is waiting for approval to hire more civilian staff. Hernandez said that budget “constraints” are impacting “how quickly and how efficiently we can move forward with that.”
During the meeting, Sanchez and Hernandez defended the work that the CPRA units do and attributed long wait times to a variety of issues that include staffing shortfalls, overly broad requests, and technological limitations (Hernandez said the department is “carefully” looking into technology that can help them respond to requests quicker). They also pointed out that, in some instances, requests can produce hundreds or even thousands of records that all need to be carefully reviewed by staff.
“So people will come in, they'll complain that it takes a really long time, but the process is really very detailed,” Hernandez said.
“I want to be clear, I'm not casting judgment on the effort that the team puts together,” Commissioner Jeff Skobin responded to Hernandez.
Skobin pointed out that the city has been sued plenty of times for not turning over public records, and they’ve lost, costing tax payers money. In Skobin’s view, those dollars would be better spent on hiring more staff to work on public records requests.
“There has been dollars paid, so we know we're not 100% compliant in this, and so you know, whatever we can do to help support getting us there, I think one, is a positive for the community, and you know, transparency and also, the law,” he says.
Upcoming Public Records Webinar
In the near future, L.A. TACO’s Investigations Newsdesk will be hosting a webinar centered on public records requests. The webinar will feature me, as well as Joey Scott, a freelance journalist and L.A. TACO contributor who is one of the most prolific public records-filers in all of Los Angeles. I’ll announce a date soon.
In the meantime, please send any questions that you have for me or Joey regarding filing public records requests or public records-related lawsuits (which Joey has a lot of experience with). You can email me at Lexis@LATACO.com.
If you’d like to receive this weekly newsletter, sign up for an L.A. TACO membership here, head over to the “My Account” section, click on “Newsletters,” and make sure the “Investigations Newsletter” is toggled on.
