Police Call and Arrest Logs

Answer

The California Supreme Court has held that the public does not have a right of access to the actual physical copies of call and arrest logs.  In a case called Williams v.Superior Court, 5 Cal. 4th 337 (1993), the California Supreme Court said that in enacting the California Public Records Act (CPRA), “the state Legislature … limited the CPRA’s exemption for law enforcement investigatory files,” in Government Code §  6254(f), “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 the department has 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, however, 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 this information is removed from the city website after a certain amount of time but is retained by the city in some other form, then it would seem to remain subject to disclosure under the PRA.

Under the PRA, the term “‘public records’ includes 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 Section 6252 (emphasis added).  If the record exists in some form and no provision of the PRA or other law exempts it from the disclosure requirements of the PRA, then it should be available to the public for inspection and copying.  Govt. Code Section 6253.  The fact that records subject to disclosure under the PRA are no longer available in a convenient online format should not mean that they need not be disclosed in whatever format they still exist.

As for how long records need to be kept by agencies in some form or another, the PRA does not prevent state or local agencies from destroying public records. (In fact, the PRA implicitly acknowledges that agencies do not retain records indefinitely. See Cal. Gov’t Code section 6254(a)). However, you should be aware of California Government Code section 34090, which governs the destruction of records by cities. That section generally requires cities to retain records that are less than two years old, although I am unaware of any authority applying this law in the context of a city policy providing for automatic deletion of emails from city servers. The full text of Section 34090 can be found by following this link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cacodes/gov/34090-34093.html Note also that “willful” destruction of public records is punishable as a crime under certain circumstances. See Cal Gov’t. Code 6200, which can be reviewed by following this link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cacodes/gov/6200-6203.html.