The city of Long Beach announced Wednesday that it has picked a former prosecutor with a reputation for rooting out corruption to head an investigation into the police department’s use of an iPhone app that automatically deleted messages sent among officers.
Gary W. Schons spent years working in the San Diego County District Attorney’s office and the California Attorney General’s office before joining the high-powered law firm Best Best & Krieger where he specializes in public integrity issues, according to his biography on the firm’s website.
While he was a prosecutor, he handled some high-profile cases in Orange County, including a sheriff’s captain accused of collecting illegal campaign donations for then-Sheriff Michael S. Carona.
In recent years, Schons was hired by Palm Springs as it sorted through the aftermath of corruption scandal, according to the Desert Sun newspaper. And last year he was set to become Orange County’s law enforcement watchdog before he withdrew his application for the county’s top job at the Office of Independent Review, according to the Orange County Register.
Schons will lead the probe into the LBPD’s use of the TigerText app that was installed on about 150 phones issued to high-ranking police officials and officers in special details like homicide and internal affairs, according to the city.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union warned the city that it believes TigerText’s automatic deletion of messages was illegal and may have compromised hundreds of criminal and civil cases.
After Al Jazeera broke the TigerText story, LBPD suspended its use and the city announced an investigation.
The city said Schons’ job will include finding out why police started using the app, how officers used it and whether they ran afoul of rules for retaining evidence and records.
Long Beach officials said they also want him to take a broad look at the city and police department’s rules for preserving records.
City Attorney Charlie Parkin said he’s not aware of any other city employees using self-deleting messaging apps on city phones, but there’s certainly the possibility they could be using similar apps to discuss city business on personal phones.
“All these texts and all these apps clearly outpace our ability to write policies and procedures to capture all them,” Parkin said.
Long Beach’s record-retention policy for email and instant messages relies heavily on individual employees to decide what communications need to be saved and which ones can be discarded. Parkin, however, said he’d never seen any system being used with such a hard-and-fast deadline for deletion of messages as TigerText, which destroyed communications within five days.
TigerText operated outside of the city’s servers, so there’s no way to recover those messages internally, according to Parkin. He said Long Beach’s IT department has already reached out to the company that makes TigerText to see if there’s any way to recapture the messages.
The results of Schons’ probe will be released to the public “to the extent allowable under California State law,” according to the city. Long Beach didn’t immediately provide any timeline for completion.
Some documents related to TigerText area already available on the city’s website.