Prying Government Open

In California, you can go into any City Hall and demand records to see how the government is doing the people’s business. That’s because of the California Public Records Act (aka CPRA).


1. A law that makes government records available to you.Let’s say you want to know how often people claim that they were wronged by the police and demand money. You can get documents that contain this information. You can see how often people demand money for police use of excessive force, for wrongful arrest, for traffic accidents by on-duty officers. These are just examples. You know your own curiosity about government.

                   2. Some City Halls are more open than others.

Some City Halls give you documents, and some City Halls give you hell. For example, Colton does its CPRA duty. It doesn’t make you go to court to get what you want.

Fontana has a troll-like protectiveness for their documents. Their lawyer will call you and cross-examine you about why you want the records – which is none of their business. (Think Monty Python and having to answer three questions to cross a bridge.) Their pettifogging attorney will quibble and quarrel with you about the exact phrasing of your request, and try to box you into a corner. It’s an unequal match, usually, because he’s a professional debater who knows the law. And, usually, you aren’t.

And after all that, if you don’t have a lawyer, Fontana will give you the bum’s rush.

We’ve sued Fontana twice, and we’ve won both times. But Fontana fights each case like the future of the free world were at stake. The CPRA is all about open government. Fontana is all about why-the-hell-don’t-you-go-away-and-mind-your-own-business.


3. City Halls pay a price for erroneously resisting CPRA requests.Fortunately, when City Hall loses a CPRA case, it has to pay the record-seeker’s attorney’s fees. In our first case, Fontana fought all the way to the day of trial, then gave up the records. We won an attorney’s-fee award of $29,000.

That might seem like a lot of money to get records from City Hall. But we filed another CPRA request to find out Fontana’s own attorney’s fees for fighting that case. Their attorneys billed Fontana $127,000 to lose a case that we spent $29,000 to win (a little more, actually – the judge shaved our fees slightly).

We won a second case against Fontana, and now we’re fighting in court over the amount of attorney’s fees. We've had four court hearings on attorney's fees alone.


4. Today’s case against Hemet.I had a hearing today in another CPRA case. The defendant was the City of Hemet. Our client had requested bite records about city police dogs. Hemet told our client to get lost. Hemet said that these records were "records of investigations" that, under the CPRA, they could withhold. They submitted to the judge hearing our case a declaration from a police sergeant that explained why police dog bite records must not be disclosed.

                    5. We had evidence that Hemet didn’t know we had.

But Hemet didn’t know that we had examples of their bite records. We had obtained examples of two kinds of Hemet Police Department records: a K-9 Use Report and a Monthly K-9 Use Summary. We got these in a criminal case we defended. And because we had these records, Hemet got crushed in court.

                     6. The winning argument.

This was our chief argument today: Hemet said that the K-9 Use Report was an investigation report; but all investigation reports must be turned over to the District Attorney, so the prosecutor can turn them over to the criminal defendant’s lawyer. That’s a right that every criminal defendant has – to see the evidence against him. That happens in every case, always. One of the reasons for investigation reports is so that the District Attorney and the criminal-defense attorney can see and evaluate the strength of the case against the defendant.

But the K-9 Use Report said this across the top: "DO NOT COPY TO THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY/THE COURT." So clearly this was not a record of investigation – if it were, it would have to go to the District Attorney and to the Court. Based on what’s written on the records themselves, these are not records of investigations.

So what are these records? They’re reports prepared as a safeguard against lawsuits by the persons bitten. Their purpose is not criminal justice. It’s protection against civil liability. And there is no basis in the CPRA to withhold these.

As to the Monthly K-9 Use Summary, Hemet didn’t even try to argue that these were privileged against disclosure. At first, Hemet pretended that such records did not exist. When we showed that we knew about them – by producing a monthly report – Hemet then pretended that they hadn’t known that we wanted those records.

The judge was smart. Based on the briefs, he said right away that he was inclined to order Hemet to release the records. Then both sides made their argument. Sometimes the judge commented or framed a question. He didn’t change his ruling.

Case won.

                     7. More people should use the CPRA.

We take CPRA cases on a contingency-fee basis. That is, we don’t charge our clients, but if we win, we collect our fee from the city.  Usually, our CPRA cases concern police use of force - like today's case, which involved bites by police K-9s. We like these cases because they relate to our civil-rights practice. And who doesn't want to know about police use-of-force against citizens? Police have so much authority; how do they use it?

The CPRA is a great tool to make government accountable to you. We're better able to judge government if we know how it does its duty. That's the goal of the CPRA.

It’s a shame more people don’t know about it and use it.

The federal government has a similar law. It’s called the Freedom of Information Act.

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If opening the government to the eyes of its citizens is something that you want to become involved in, visit our website at http://criminal-civilrights-attorney.com/