4:05pm | That’s the argument that the Long Beach police union is making, as the Los Angeles Times reported recently that their request to obtain names of officers involved in shootings since 2005 was blocked when the union obtained a temporary court order that barred the city from releasing names.
Long Beach City Attorney Robert Shannon notified the Times that his office will release some, but not all, of the names to the Times on January 15. Click here to read the Los Angeles Times article.
The union and supporters of the court order say that releasing names of officers involved in shootings puts them in danger, especially in the Internet Age when information on an individual is sometimes readily available online. The Times would argue that the public has a certain right to know such facts in the wake of fatal incidents like the December shooting of 35-year old Doug Zerby as he sat in a Long Beach apartment courtyard (officers fired when they say Zerby pointed an object they believed was a gun at them – it was a water nozzle).
But the Times points to a 2009 incident when the Sheriff’s Department refused to release names, but was forced to by a judge when he ruled that the names were not protected and that “the public interest is paramount where an officer has fired a weapon.” The case has been appealed and therefore not resolved, though they also point out that it is the Los Angeles Police Department’s policy to release officer names after shootings.
What do you think? Does the potential threat to the officers outweigh the right of the public to know who is involved in the incidents? Certainly, no one wants to put law enforcement officers at risk, but at the same time there is undoubtedly a desire to know who is involved in police shootings. It seems that come January 15 the Times may have that information anyway, and what they choose to do with it is yet to be seen.