After a two-year legal battle, the state agency that certifies police officers in California has agreed to EFF’s demand that it stop using copyright concerns as a predicate to withhold law enforcement training materials from public scrutiny.
The immediate impact of this victory for transparency is the public will be able to visit the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards & Training (POST) website to inspect 19 previously unseen training outlines. These documents cover a variety of sensitive issues, such as police shootings and internal affairs investigations, and were developed by the California Peace Officers Association, which represents more than 23,000 law enforcement officers across the state. The longer term impact is that law enforcement agencies across California will no longer be able to rely on POST’s practices to justify their own decisions to withhold their training records on copyright grounds.
The story behind this case dates back to 2018, when California State Senator Steven Bradford introduced legislation that recognized a key ingredient to police accountability is allowing the public to scrutinize what kind of training officers receive when it comes to practices such as police stops, use-of-force, and surveillance. SB 978 requires all local law enforcement agencies and POST to publish their policy manuals and training materials on their websites, at least to the extent that those records would be releasable under the California Public Records Act. With EFF’s support, the California legislature passed the bill and it went into effect in January 2020.
However, when EFF went to the POST’s OpenData hub to review training materials for issues such as police shootings, automated license plate readers, and face recognition, we found that the documents were completely redacted. Even the training on California public records requests was ironically redacted. All that was left was a single line: “
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