Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Chris Egusa: Before we start, just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode briefly references violence, sexual assault, and suicide. If you or someone you know needs support, we’ve got links to resources in the episode description.
Sukey Lewis: Hey everyone, Sukey here. I’ve got a conversation with a very special guest to share with you in this bonus episode of On Our Watch. Those internal affairs recordings that you heard in this podcast, both in Season One and in Season Two, never would have been made public without California State Senator Nancy Skinner. She authored a landmark police transparency bill — Senate Bill 1421 — which was signed into law in 2018 as the Right to Know Act. This law finally broke through decades of secrecy in the state, and she further expanded it a few years later with SB 16. Skinner is serving her final term in the legislature this year and joined me to talk about her legacy, the ongoing barriers to transparency, and I was able to share with her some of what we found out about use of force at New Folsom and the crisis among correctional staff.
Thank you so much for joining me, Senator. As the architect of this law, which has done so much for law enforcement transparency in California, I wanted to bring you on the podcast to reflect on what’s changed in the past five years. You know, where you still see the need for improvement in terms of transparency. But before we get into all that, can you also just give us a little insight into how the law came to be?
Nancy Skinner: Certainly, and thank you for doing the podcast and for focusing on this very important issue. Back in the 70s, California passed a law that blocked public access to any and all records related to police conduct. And if you compare that to California’s Public Records Act, where you can pretty much request or receive any info you might want about a city or county employee, whether they’re a librarian or a street sweeper, you can find out anything. It doesn’t even have to be misconduct. But not police. They were the one category of, say, city or county employees, just as an example, where you could get no information. So California had almost a 50 year block and a total secrecy on police records, which made us arguably the least transparent state in the US of A. Which is odd when you consider, you know, what we pride ourselves about. And there were numerous previous attempts by other legislators. And when those efforts came around, when I was in the Assembly, I voted yes on each one of them, but none of them made it. I can tell you a little bit more about then why my staff and I in 2018 decided to act.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah, tell me about that. Like what made the conditions kind of ripe for it to to finally go through in 2018?
Nancy Skinner: There were a number of well publicized law enforcement incidents, whether it’s Rodney King or other things, Oscar Grant, the shooting at the BART platform on a New Year’s Eve, you know, where the public was like, “Hey, what happened? What went on? And were these people investigated and or did the police act justifiably, you know, what were the conditions?” But we couldn’t find out. So, you know, there’s always been some high profile incidents, but there just seemed to be much more public attention to a number of high profile incidents in 2018, in that time period, where there was an openness for some access to police records. So those were some of the things that then made my staff and I sit down and think, “Okay, if we’re going to attempt this, given that every attempt prior has failed, how are we going to frame it?” And we thought, “All right, we’re going to focus on three specific areas. If an officer kills someone or causes great bodily injury or used a gun on someone, that those are things that of course the public feels like, ‘Hey, I want to know what happened there.’ If there was sexual assault by an officer on a member of the public, or if an officer is engaged in falsifying records or dishonesty, tampering of evidence, that kind of thing.” So we thought, “Those three who could, who could in a justifiably or with their head held up high, argue that those things should not be made publicly available.”
Sukey Lewis: The law, The Right to Know Act, went into effect, actually before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the massive protests, which was really interesting just as a reporter, to be equipped when that happened to begin to respond to questions here in California about police departments, we finally were able to get some answers and to get some transparency. In the last season of this podcast, we were able to find out new details about the killing of Oscar Grant that were really impactful for the family. And also, I think really important and understanding that like seminal incident for you, you know, what’s the most gratifying impact that you’ve seen from the law that you’re the most proud of?
Nancy Skinner: Well, let’s talk the Oscar Grant situation. The Fruitvale Bart station is in my district. Oscar Grant was my constituent. I know now his mother very well. His uncle, Uncle Bobby, various other family members. And, when that incident occurred, BART itself did not have good police review. And so that was one of the big issues that people felt like, “Wow, BART doesn’t even have an independent review board of their police. And of course, we can’t get records on this incident.” And of course, the family, I mean, they were kept in the dark until there were the lawsuits. I mean, sure, there were charges taken against the officer who killed Oscar Grant. That officer was Johannes Mehserle. But the only information they got was that which was revealed in court. They had no other information, and it was just horrible to watch that. So I was very, very happy when 1421 passed. That immediately of course, Oscar Grant’s family requested those records. It took a while for BART to release them, but they did finally get them, and it brought a lot of closure for them.
But now let’s go to: how does public safety work? How do we achieve public safety? It’s not just having police in our communities. It’s that the police have the cooperation and respect from community members. So from my point of view, if we know that our police departments and our law enforcement agencies take misconduct seriously and that they hold officers accountable for misconduct, then we’re going to trust them more. And when we get the records, it lets us know, “Hey, you know, it was officer X accused of anything? And if so, what steps did our police department take in investigating officer X? And then, what consequences were there?” That’s why having access to these records is important.
Sukey Lewis: And where is the conversation around law enforcement transparency now? Like what have you heard from your constituents? What are the conversations you have with other lawmakers?
Nancy Skinner: Well, you know, we’ve discussed already that 1421, the first attempt that was successful in over 40 years was modest. And then we did SB 16, because we saw, you know, whether it was George Floyd or other incidents — we just saw that look, racial bias is a legitimate thing for the public to know. Are there a set of officers in a particular department that have, you know, umpteen numbers of complaints around racial bias that have been investigated and upheld? And then some of the other things that SB 16 did was look at what other kinds of excessive use of force — so not just the gun. There are many other types of excessive force. Or the other thing we wanted to ensure, let’s say you’re an officer who, under 1421 that you had some falsifying of records, you had committed some dishonesty. And we you know, we want to find out about this. Well, you quit the force before the investigation is completed. So then it’s not on your personnel record and it’s not available to me. So then you go and get hired by another police agency. So basically, by not requiring that records follow the officer and that each agency who hires an officer requests explicitly whether there were, you know, such investigations on that officer — we allow bad apples to move around to different law enforcement agencies. So that was another really important improvement of SB 16.
But of course, there are probably other legitimate things that the public has the right to know that aren’t covered yet in 1421 or 16. And, you know, we can talk about some of that, I have ideas. Somebody in the future will have to do them.
Sukey Lewis: One thing that we’ve seen, you know, in recent years, especially like since the passage of the Right to Know Act, are these memorandums that are being entered into between the employers- the employing agency and the unions, basically giving notice or agreeing to give notice to any officer who is named in their records before they’re released. And, you know, in some lights, like you can see how that makes sense, right? Like, oh, my name is going to go out to the public. I would like to know that as an individual. But I think my concern from a transparency perspective is that it also gives the ability then for the union lawyers to intervene and say, oh, this is actually not a discloseable record. And they get kind of a first shot at claiming that it’s non-discloseable before the public gets a chance to look at the underlying misconduct. And so I just wanted to know if you’ve heard anything about that or you know if you have any thoughts on it.
Nancy Skinner: Well I’ve definitely heard some about it. And I’ll preface my next set of comments about it with, look, police officers have a very difficult job. I do not envy police officers. Every time they walk out of their door, meaning, you know, they leave home to go to work in uniform, they take their lives in their hands. I’m careful about the way I do legislation, such as both SB 1421 and SB 16, to legitimately give our officers some right to privacy. Their names should not be disclosed when it’s not appropriate. We don’t need them to be targets if they have not, you know, really engaged in serious misconduct.
So I’m very, very protective of that privacy. And I also respect their ability to have a collective bargaining unit, to be in a union. Now, on the other hand, it’s I don’t like MOU agreements that unnecessarily or unlawfully delay the release of records that the public have a right to know about. So it is a balance. We want to protect their privacy, but we do not want MOUs that are counter to good laws that we have passed.
Sukey Lewis: At my organization, KQED, you know, we’ve really made a push statewide to try and get as many of these internal records as possible to help the public, you know, gain access and understanding of these, you know, key public institutions — our local police departments, state law enforcement agencies. And most recently, my focus has really been on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which is the largest employer of peace officers in the state and is also one of the most kind of, obscure, not obscure agencies, but opaque. Yeah, very, you know, hard, hard to see inside of it’s a closed world, literally. You know, with everything happens behind these walls. And, you know, one thing that we were able to find out by, you know, utilizing the public records law by utilizing the Right to Know Act, was the incredibly high number of these very serious use of force incidents at this one prison, California State Prison, Sacramento, which is also kind of colloquially known as New Folsom. And I was just wondering, like in your years kind of on the public Safety Committee and, you know, overseeing CDCR and other, via other committees, if this prison had come to your attention before.
Nancy Skinner: Well, first, this is exactly the proof of the validity and the need for bills like 1421 and SB 16 — to enable us to get that information about… If we have a particular prison that has far higher incidence, then we have to wonder, what is it about the culture at that prison that creates this kind of violence? Staff on incarcerated individual violence, which your request of the record seems to indicate. Because we, interestingly, even legislators, I can’t just go to a prison unannounced and visit it. No, there’s all kinds of rules that prohibit. And California now, you know, we already talked about we had the 40 year kind of, 50 year really blackout on these records. Well, we’ve had almost an equivalent number of years where we’ve denied media access to our prisons.
And again, this is where we are an outlier. Many, many states, Maine, Rhode Island, many others allow much more journalistic access to their prisons than California does. Which is why I’m carrying a bill this year, SB 254, which would restore limited access of news media to our California prisons, as well as access to our judicial branch and legislators to be able to, you know, go in and check out the conditions in our prisons.
I chair California’s Women’s Caucus, which is now 50 strong. We have 50 women in the legislature out of 120. So we’re really proud of that. But we’ve been focused on there’s two women’s state prisons. And just this year we have a situation where a D.A. in, I believe it’s Madera County, has charged one officer from our facility in Chowchilla — our women’s facility in Chowchilla — charged that officer with 90 counts of sexual assault against some 16 different incarcerated individuals.
And the horrific part was that he did this sexual assault while these women were waiting to go before the parole board. So here you are. You’re prepping yourself. You know, this is the determination of whether you can go free or not. And this man is taking you into a room and assaulting you. I mean, it is beyond horrific. So the Women’s Caucus, we have gotten very involved in that. We did a trip to that prison.
So far, we don’t have a comprehensive set of things that we’re trying to enact to change the conditions, but we certainly have strengthened California’s Office of the Inspector General over our prisons, for the incarcerated individuals to get complaints of this sort of behavior to the inspector general rather than just to officials within the prison therein. Because, of course, when you’re in that kind of closed environment, you don’t know, is your complaint even going to be taken seriously? So those are some of the issues that having transparency, getting records, getting journalists into our prisons is going to help us.
Sukey Lewis: I have, also in my reporting, talked to quite a few incarcerated women who, you know, experienced things themselves and also just experienced the brokenness of the grievance system. I think one of the, you know, very concerning patterns that we found in our reporting was just how many similar grievances we found piling up against a particular officer. So it was very easy to identify somebody who was repeatedly using very serious use of force and injuring people. And people were filing grievances on this person, but there was no upholding of it. There was no discipline. And a lot of that goes down to kind of the credibility issue that the incarcerated people filing the grievances didn’t have credibility, and it wasn’t captured on camera. And I think for some of the sexual assault instances, it’s been the same where it’s like piled up.
Nancy Skinner: Yeah. Well, the the officer I mentioned with the 80 counts against him, his name is Rod- Rodriguez. You know, he took the women in a room. He knew the camera was not there. There was no camera in the room that he took them. And, you know, that was definitely purposefully done. And it was over a number of years, the assaults. And it’s hard to imagine that no one else knew. So the other thing that we have to make sure is that whatever reforms we put in not only go after the perpetrator, but anyone who aids or abets or… Aids or abets the perpetrator or sees it and does nothing about it.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah. And I think that is going to be the key, which is also, I think, a really tough nut to crack, you know, which is the issue of the code of silence, the culture of fear inside CDCR. And that that is not just the people who are incarcerated, that’s staff as well. You know, medical staff that I’ve spoken to, psychiatric staff and also correctional officers, and they fear blowing the whistle. They fear coming forward. And they say if they do, you know, they fear that they will be, you know, labeled a rat by their fellow officers and mistreated by them. And then that administrators also, they’ll kind of blacklist them and put them off to the side. It will be very kind of subtle and hard to see retaliation, but that retaliation that they know will come or that they say they know will come.
Nancy Skinner: The terrible, terrible irony of this mistreatment — this, in some cases, brutal conditions — in our prison facilities against our incarcerated individuals. The damage is not just the incarcerated individual. Our corrections officers, they have high rates of suicide. They have their average life expectancy is they die before age 60. While they can retire with great retirement benefits at, I think, age 52 or so. They don’t even live past that. And so the level of stress when you’re in a setting like that, where either you are yourself engaged in this, you know, very inhumane conditions, inhumane treatment — or that you are, you know, going against your own moral self to observing it — it damages everyone.
And this is why I think Governor Newsom has adopted this Norway model. And a number of US legislators have taken trips. And I was one of them, who we’ve gone and seen the prisons in Norway and what they do instead and how they treat it. They look at their prison system as, “Yes, the individual committed a heinous act, however likely that individual at some point is going to go back home, is going to live in our community. So how do we use the time that we have them in custody to best bring them to a circumstance where they can be productive and healthy and contribute to their community instead of hurting it?” So I was very, very happy to see Governor Newsom embrace that.
Sukey Lewis: You brought up, you know, officer suicide, which was, you know, a really recurrent theme and and problem that we found in our reporting as well. And I think one thing that really shocked me was just how many suicides there were. You know, we found through talking to the correctional officers union, the CCPOA and other word of mouth sources that 31 officers died over a four year period by suicide between 2020 and 2024. And that was just a pretty staggering number and also not a complete number. And so I went to CDCR and asked them for their numbers, and they said, “We don’t track this.” And the fact that they said they don’t track this problem, which I feel is like the highest level red flag indicator of a mental health crisis in their employee base, I think is very problematic. I don’t know if you can comment on that.
Nancy Skinner: Well, they should track it, and I feel that CCPOA should also, because there’s often tension between the legislature and CCPOA, that’s the prison guards union. But I think if- the legislature in general, we don’t want unhealthy work conditions for anyone. And here this is one of our largest base of state workers. And the consequences of bad conditions on the job for them have great consequences, not only on them, as you’ve indicated with the suicides, but also just their, you know, their life expectancy rate.
But it also has bad consequences on the individuals who are in the prison. And while California hasn’t embraced completely Norway’s sense that, “Look, our role at prisons is not focused really on punishment, but it should be to prepare you to go home.” The reality is the majority of our people go home, too. In other words, the majority of people that we’re holding in a state prison eventually go home. So what good does it do if we send them home damaged? And what good does it do if the employees who are in charge of them in custody are also damaged? None of that is healthy. So it’s one thing I’ve done a lot is engaged with our CCPOA to, you know, really work with them together to kind of embrace, “Hey, we could do it differently and it could be much improved for you, the worker and for that individual who’s being held by us.”
Sukey Lewis: All right. I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time, and I just so appreciate it. And I wanted to know, is there anything else that I didn’t ask you about that you want to bring up today or talk about on the podcast?
Nancy Skinner: Well, I- this is my last year in the legislature, so I won’t get to, you know, add more police transparency, at least as a legislator for the moment. But I certainly, as chair of the Women’s Caucus, we have engaged more in these issues because I really hope that more of my colleagues that are going to continue in the legislature beyond me, will, will really embrace the importance of, that we have a good carceral system. And I know for some people that just putting those two words together is from their, their point of view, an oxymoron. But public safety is our objective. And having a inhumane system does not help public safety. And I think more of my women colleagues are understanding that. And we’re even- we’ve arranged a trip to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland for some women legislators in September to visit their women’s carceral facilities and to see how they’re doing it differently in those countries, to see what lessons learned we can bring home to California.
Sukey Lewis: Thank you so much for your time, Senator.
Nancy Skinner: Okay. Thank you.
Sukey Lewis: If you want to learn more about the Right to Know Act and other law enforcement transparency bills, we’ll include links in the episode description. Please continue to send tips or feedback about the series to onourwatch@kqed.org.
This episode was hosted by me, Sukey Lewis. It was edited by Jen Chien, who is also KQED’s Director of podcasts. It was produced by Chris Egusa, final mixing by Christopher Beale. Original music by Ramtin Arablouei, including our theme song. Additional music from APM Music and Audio Network. Funding for On Our Watch is provided in part by Arnold Ventures and the California Endowment. Thank you to Katie Sprenger, our podcast operations manager; our Managing Editor of News and Enterprise, Otis R. Taylor Jr.; Ethan Toven-Lindsay, our Vice President of News; and KQED Chief Content Officer Holly Kernan. And thanks to all of you for listening.
