Question
If a police officer took notes about an auto accident and wrote down witness statements on a piece of paper, is that paper considered public record? I’ve requested this document but have been told that the agency doesn’t have that document.
Answer
The California Public Records Act (“CPRA”) generally requires state and local agencies to disclose any public record on request to any member of the public unless the record falls within a specific statutory exemption from disclosure. Govt. Code §§ 7922.525, 7922.530. General information about the CPRA is available on the public records handbook page of our website.
A “public record” is “any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used, or retained by any state or local agency regardless of physical form or characteristics.” Govt. Code § 7920.530(a).
A “writing” is “any handwriting, typewriting, printing, photostating, photographing, photocopying, transmitting by electronic mail or facsimile, and every other means of recording upon any tangible thing any form of communication or representation, including letters, words, pictures, sounds, or symbols, or combinations thereof, and any record thereby created, regardless of the manner in which the record has been stored.” Govt. Code § 7920.545.
As courts have said, the CPRA “is designed to give the public access to information in possession of public agencies. [The CPRA] itself does not undertake to prescribe what type of information a public agency may gather, nor to designate the type of records such an agency may keep, nor to provide a method of correcting such records. Its sole function is to provide for disclosure.” Los Angeles Police Dept. v. Superior Court, 65 Cal. App. 3d 661, 668 (1977).
If an officer took notes at the scene of the accident to help prepare a report but later destroyed the notes when the report was complete, the notes might have been a public record while they existed, but it’s not clear that the CPRA would require disclosure of notes destroyed before your request. We take no position on whether the officer was required to keep the notes under any law outside the CPRA, but the CPRA itself does not necessarily require disclosure of records that were destroyed before a request was made.
Because you wrote that the agency does not have a copy of the notes, we have not addressed whether the notes would be exempt from disclosure if they still existed.
Asked & Answered posts should not be relied on as legal advice, and FAC makes no guarantees about their completeness or accuracy. All posts carry a date of publication that readers should take note of in assessing their usefulness, given that laws and interpretations of them may change over time. Posts predating Jan. 1, 2023, that discuss the California Public Records Act may contain statute numbers no longer in use. Please see this page for a table showing how the California Public Records Act has been renumbered.