Skip to content

By Katey Rusch, UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program

Since we exposed the widespread use of secret deals to bury police officers’ misconduct in California, we’ve been asked the same question repeatedly: How did you know these agreements existed when they were designed to evade detection?

The honest answer is that it happened by accident.

In spring 2019, I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, working for the Investigative Reporting Program, or IRP. We had a sprawling investigation into California cops with criminal convictions. The state Department of Justice had inadvertently sent a list of peace officers with criminal records to a pair of IRP reporters. A fellow graduate student and I were tasked with gathering records to verify the accuracy of the dataset.

However, our focus quickly turned to an agency in California’s Central Valley where many active officers not only had criminal convictions, but had been previously fired by the same police force in Southern California.

We documented their firings through interviews and termination records. But when we called these officers, they fervently denied they’d even been fired, urging us to call their former department to clear up the error. With few clues, we were left to reconcile this contradiction. 

Then, another graduate student, Casey Smith, posed a simple question that would be the starting point of this investigation: Could these officers have sued their department for wrongful termination — and settled?

A week later, after filing a request under California’s Public Records Act for settlements involving these officers and their former department, we got our first look at these “clean-record agreements.” The language in each was similar and shocking, promising to “seal this agreement in HR personnel file,” for example, and “purge and destroy the Sealed Files and all references to … termination.”

While we got our hands on these first five agreements with relative ease, obtaining the remaining 297 that we examined proved painstaking. The deals contained strict confidentiality clauses, some of which warned of financial penalties for disclosure. Moreover, most records custodians at the 500-plus agencies we contacted had no idea agreements like this even existed, let alone where to look for documents.

The key to obtaining these written deals was a three-pronged approach. First, we asked for these agreements from nearly every police agency in the state. Second, working closely with Professor Susan Seager and her clinic at the UC Irvine School of Law, we read every bit of case law related to public access to settlement agreements in California — and included that research in our new requests. 

Perhaps most crucially, we spent a great deal of time educating municipal officials about what these deals were, including providing them redacted versions and telling them where the agreements likely were stored.

In the end, it was the breadth of our research that allowed us to report our strongest findings:

  • In the previous decade, at least 163 California police agencies had executed clean-record agreements concealing misconduct allegations against 297 officers and deputies. At least five officers had secured clean-record agreements from multiple agencies.
  • Of the 297 officers and deputies identified by the investigation, 52 were subsequently hired by another law enforcement agency, while 56 were hired as security guards or landed jobs as correctional officers.
  • More than half of the officers who secured clean-record agreements also received lump-sum payments as part of the deals totaling $23.7 million.

Frustratingly, more than one-third of the agencies denied us access to some or all of their agreements, including the 10 largest departments in the state. Instead of allowing these denials to limit the scope of the investigation, we used them to illustrate the extent of the problem. By denying us access to some or all of their agreements, the agencies admitted they were in possession of these types of deals, showing the pervasiveness of the problem in all corners of the state.

In some ways, obtaining these agreements was the more straightforward challenge of this investigation. The reporting got harder still when we discovered that many of the deals ensured that officers received a huge additional financial benefit: a disability pension. Under state law, disability pensions are supposed to be given to California first-responders so severely injured in the line of duty that they cannot work. But we found that departments were doling out these  lifetime, tax-free payments to rid themselves of troubled officers.

To report this portion of the investigation, we needed details on the officers’ claimed injuries. Unlike settlement agreements, public employee medical records are generally exempt from being released, as are records related to disability pensions in California. We were initially worried we had no way to get around these strict confidentiality rules.

Then, while conducting a basic clip search on the topic, I found an incredibly helpful series written in 2004 by John Hill and Dorothy Korber for the Sacramento Bee, about the abuse of medical pensions by officers at the California Highway Patrol. Citing their sources, the article outlined how the reporters had tracked abuse of the system through workers’ compensation claims. While the article did not spell out how reporters accessed these records, it gave me enough to get started.

With the help of the League of California City’s public records guide, I learned that disputed workers’ compensation claims were releasable under state public records law. All of the cases in our investigation involved disputed injury claims, giving us access to thousands of pages of workers’ compensation records that often included narratives about officers’ alleged misconduct.

In the end we found:

  • At least 49 police officers and deputies who were on the verge of being ousted for misconduct had been allowed to leave their agencies with their wrongdoing buried and disability pensions approved.
  • Five of these officers later returned to law enforcement while still collecting disability pensions. Thirteen more went on to obtain private security jobs, also while collecting their pensions.
  • These 49 officers had collected more than $23.5 million in disability pensions, most of it tax-free. California officers approved for disability retirements are entitled to at least half of their final salaries, tax-free, every year for the rest of their lives.

The publication of our series “Right to Remain Secret” — in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle, which provided additional editing, legal review, visuals, design and promotion — led to consequences for several of the individual officers we profiled. Some lost their jobs. But the biggest potential impact is still unfolding. In direct response to our reporting, a California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would ban the use of these agreements and make them all public records. The bill is making its way through the legislature with bipartisan support.

Meanwhile, the state’s pension system manager, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, is investigating all of the 49 disability pensions identified in our reporting for possible revocation.

Scroll To Top