Following public outcry last week, a proposal to destroy a batch of police records from 2014 has been pulled from the Long Beach City Council’s Tuesday night agenda.
The records slated for destruction included use-of-force reviews, internal affairs investigations of complaints and reviews of policy compliance from between July 2014 and December 2014.
In a rare move, Long Beach issued a statement Saturday afternoon saying the records destruction item on the council’s agenda was a routine one, requested by the City Clerk’s office.
However, the city said, officials got “questions from the public” about the item after social media lit up with concerns and local media, including the Signal Tribune and Forthe.org, wrote about the issue.
The intense scrutiny on normally obscure records-retention policies comes as Long Beach enters its third week of police brutality protests in response to the deaths of George Floyd and other Black men and women.
The agenda item even sparked a call for protesters to gather outside City Hall during Tuesday night’s council meeting, which will be the first time the council will hear live public call-ins since the coronavirus pandemic closed council meetings to the public.
Under California law, the type of police records that were on the agenda can be destroyed after a minimum of 5 years. Municipalities, however, can adopt policy to hold onto these records for longer periods of time.
The records Long Beach planned to destroy typically wouldn’t be available to the public, according to the City Council agenda. Only a subset of police records—including those about police shootings and officers acting dishonestly—are public record because of strict privacy protections for police officers enshrined in state law.
However, the records set to be destroyed could potentially be important for defense attorneys who suspect their client is the victim of police misconduct. If a judge decides they’re relevant, police records can be unsealed to impeach police officers testifying at trial.
While the records in question belonged to the police department, the request to destroy them came from the City Clerk’s office “in its capacity as responsible agent for the operation of the Records Center” according to the City Council agenda item. The City Attorney’s office also signed off on the request.
“Each City department follows a records retention schedule that is in compliance with California Secretary of State guidelines and approved by the City Council,” Long Beach said in its statement Saturday. “The Office of the City Clerk works with each department to ensure compliance with these retention schedules and routinely places resolutions of records destruction on City Council agendas. At the request of the Long Beach Police Department, their department records destruction item was removed from Tuesday’s agenda.”
The police department, however, requested that the item be pulled “because we are currently reviewing all of our processes to ensure the highest level of transparency,” said Long Beach police spokeswoman Arantxa Chavarria.