College Campus Police Blotter
Q: I am interested in finding out whether the police blotter on college campuses is public record. Are there any case laws regarding this particular topic?
A: As you may know, under the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”), records in the possession of public entities are presumed to be public unless one of the Act’s enumerated exceptions to disclosure applies. I am unaware of any case law specifically addressing the availability of records maintained by campus law enforcement under the CPRA, although the CPRA would apply to such records to the extent the police working on the campus are members of local police departments.
However, Government Code section 6254(f) sets forth the so-called “law enforcement” exemption, which allows police agencies to withhold investigatory records. This exemption does not, on the other hand, allow the police to withhold all information contained in those records. In a case called Williams v. Superior Court, 5 Cal. 4th 337 (1993), the California Supreme Court said that, in enacting the PRA, “the state
Legislature … limited the CPRA’s exemption for law enforcement investigatory files . . . by requiring agencies to disclose specific information derived from the materials in investigatory files rather than the materials, themselves.” Thus, the Court said, the “required disclosures of information derived from the records about incidents, arrests, and complaints [or requests for assistance to law enforcement] need not, in most cases, entail disclosure of the records themselves.”
Here’s what the CPRA, in section 6254(f), says law enforcement agencies have to provide to the public: “the time, substance, and location of all complaints or requests for assistance received by the agency and the time and nature of the response thereto, including, to the extent the information regarding crimes alleged or committed or any other incident investigated is recorded, the time, date, and location of occurrence, [and] the time and date of the report, the name, age, and current address of the victim ….” Agencies must also disclose to the public “[t]he full name, current address, and occupation of every individual arrested by the agency, the individual’s physical description including date of birth, color of eyes and hair, sex, height and weight, the time and date of arrest, the time and date of booking, the location of the arrest, the factual circumstances surrounding the arrest, the amount of bail set, the time and manner of release or the location where the individual is currently being held, and all charges the individual is being held upon, including any outstanding warrants from other jurisdictions and parole or probation holds.”
As a practical matter, many law enforcement agencies have decided it is easier to provide copies of police reports or particular pages of police blotters regarding a particular incident rather than orally provide the information that the CPRA requires them to disclose. However, under the Williams case, they have an argument that they do not have to disclose the actual dispatch logs themselves if they don’t want to.
If the information that must be disclosed would be useful to you, you may want to communicate with the campus police to submit a CPRA written request for the information you seek, reminding them of their obligation under section 6254(f) to provide you with the required disclosures. A sample CPRA request is available on CFAC’s website at:
http://www.cfac.org/templates/cpraletter.html.