This two-part series represents the first major collaboration between UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and the San Francisco Chronicle. The partnership was both energizing and crucial, combining strengths of the two organizations in ways that benefited both. The series was reported and written by a pair of IRP staffers, who were guided and edited by the head of the program. Chronicle editors then helped lead the team to publication, with the newspaper offering additional edits while photographing, designing, lawyering and promoting the stories.
In all, the project was five years in the making. It began to take shape in 2019, when reporter Katey Rusch interviewed the former chief of the Banning Police Department east of Los Angeles.
Leonard Purvis was adamant: He had fired a lieutenant, a sergeant and three other officers for alleged misconduct, including sexual assault, and had the paperwork to prove it. So why, when Rusch called these officers, did they all claim they had not been fired — and that their personnel files with the agency would confirm their story? The answer lay in five secret settlements the public was never supposed to see.
In each deal, the Banning Police Department promised to alter an officer’s personnel file to erase a termination and instead say an officer had resigned. Any future employer who called for a reference would learn nothing about the alleged transgressions. For good measure, the department promised that any records that referenced a firing would be placed in a sealed file until they could legally be destroyed.
Were these extraordinary “clean-record agreements” unique to Banning, Rusch wondered, or widespread? She and her IRP reporting partner Casey Smith set to work. They filed more than a thousand public records requests, demanding documents from every one of the 501 local law enforcement agencies in the state. Due to the many layers of secrecy protecting these types of settlements, it took three years for the reporters to obtain more than 300 of them, prying them from the sealed folders and cabinets in which they were explicitly kept.
Even greater hurdles came after reporters received these agreements. But while reporters were unable to access many of the underlying misconduct records — either because they had been destroyed or were deemed confidential — they found workarounds, conducting interviews with nervous sources and boring into worker’s compensation claims, family court records and officer discrimination claims.
The resulting report not only exposed these records for the first time, but illustrated in stunning detail how California regulators and lawmakers had failed to stop the practice, while officers whose misconduct was buried were able to land new jobs in new places. In many cases, the officers also collected a tax-free disability retirement in an exchange that often appeared to violate state law.
