Principles for Public Safety Employment

In Int’l Federation etc. Local 21 v. Superior Court 383 , the California Supreme Court held that the names and salaries of public employees who earn $100,000 or more per year must be disclosed under the California Public Records Act. In this case, Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc. submitted a request under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) to the City of Oakland for the names, job titles, and gross salaries of all City employees who earned $100,000 or more in the fiscal year 2003-2004, including the employees whose base salary equaled or exceeded that amount and those who earned a lower base salary but were paid $100,000 or more because of overtime pay. The City agreed to disclose the salary and overtime information for each job classification, but refused to provide salary information linked to individual employees on the grounds that individually identified salary information was private and exempt from disclosure. The Supreme Court disagreed. The Court found that the disclosure of records of a public entity’s payroll expenditures does not constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy because a public employee’s private interest over his or her salary information does not outweigh the public’s interest in disclosure. The Court reasoned that, to the extent that public employees expect their salaries to remain a private matter, they are incorrect. Based on the Court’s reasoning a public entity should disclose names and salaries of public employees upon receipt of a proper public records request. Long Beach Police Officers Ass’n v. City of Long Beach 384 concerned a PRA request for the names of the officers involved in a fatal shooting, along with the names of Long Beach police officers involved in other shootings over the preceding five years. The police officers association sought to enjoin the City from complying with the request. In support of its position, the association expressed safety concerns about releasing the names of the shooting officers, referring to an incident in which an anonymous blog post contained a threat to a shooting officer’s family and to another incident in which an officer involved in a shooting was reassigned to another area following death threats. The City, aligning itself with the association, asserted that its policy was not to release the names of officers involved in an officer-involved shooting because those officers become the subject of an administrative and/or criminal investigation, and the investigation materials become part of the officers’ personnel records. The City asserted that upon completion of the investigation process, the officers names were kept confidential unless a motion was filed pursuant to Pitchess , or they were sought through discovery in a civil or criminal case. The trial court denied the request for an injunction because the officers’ names were not subject to any PRA exemption and consequently had to be disclosed. The California Court of Appeal affirmed. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeal, upholding the trial court’s denial of the Union’s requested injunctive relief. 385 The Supreme Court declined to read Penal Code section 832.8 broadly and determined that, in general, only records generated in connection with officer appraisal or discipline are protected by

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