Katey Rusch and Casey Smith were students in the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program in 2019 when they compared notes about law enforcement issues they had researched during their summer break.
While home in Indiana, Smith looked into legal settlements between police officers and private citizens. Rusch stayed in California, seeking information on officers with criminal convictions. Rusch told Smith she had encountered something strange: Several officers she talked to, who once worked together in the same department, insisted they had clean personnel records, although their former chief insisted just as fervently that they did not.
The duo decided to do some digging. They asked for records of legal settlements between those officers and their former police department. Prior to requesting the documents, neither had ever heard of a clean-record agreement — an agreement that an employer will remove damaging information from an employee’s personnel file in exchange for the employee leaving the position. The arrangement allows employees to seek new jobs, their allegations of wrongdoing hidden from the world.
“Honestly, I didn’t know what we were going to get,” says Rusch, who was a broadcast journalist for 10 years before starting graduate school at UC Berkeley. “A week later, we got five different clean-record agreements from this police department and looked within those agreements, and we were surprised by what we found.”
Five officers had been fired for alleged misconduct, including sexual assault. But their personnel files were altered to hide that information and indicate they had simply resigned.
Rusch and Smith began investigating other police departments. Over the next three years, they filed thousands of public records requests, searching statewide for evidence of other law enforcement agencies using legal agreements to hide employee histories from one another — and the public.
What they learned
Their work was often as tedious as it was challenging. But they got help from the Press Freedom Project, a legal clinic at the University of California, Irvine’s law school that provides free legal assistance to independent journalists, nonprofit news outlets and other journalism organizations in California. Law students and faculty helped them fight for records.
Rusch and Smith continued investigating clean-record agreements after they graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020. Rusch stayed at the university to work as a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Program. Smith moved to Indiana, pitching in while also reporting for The Associated Press and, later, States Newsroom.
At various points along the way, the journalists wanted to publish stories chronicling what they had found because they knew the public would want to know. However, they decided to hold off, collecting more records and conducting more interviews to get a fuller understanding of the problem.
“We didn’t just go with the first, second or third iteration of this story,” says Smith, a reporter at the Indiana Capital Chronicle, which is part of States Newsroom, and a part-time journalism instructor at Ball State University. “The fact we waited, and Katey pushed through — it took this from a story about ‘Here are some cases where bad cops were able to get their wrongdoing covered up’ to ‘Here is this system, this whole system of coverup.’”
The end result: “Right to Remain Secret,” a two-part series published in the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2024 that exposed what the journalists describe as “a secret system of legal settlements that has whitewashed the corruption, criminality and other misconduct of law enforcement officers throughout California for decades.”
The project features interactive graphics that show where police agencies have executed clean-record agreements.
Among the journalists’ discoveries:
- At least 163 police and sheriff’s offices have signed clean-record agreements with at least 297 officers and deputies. Most of the agreements Rusch and Smith found were signed between 2012 and 2022. “The actual numbers are likely much higher, because one-third of police agencies asked to release the agreements refused, citing privacy laws,” they write.
- Officers whose records were altered “include a deputy accused of groping a woman held in a county jail, an officer who investigators determined falsified a report to link a man to a crime, and a deputy who was found to have violated department policy when he fatally shot a teenager as he lay wounded,” Rusch and Smith explain. Five officers had clean-record agreements with more than one agency.
- Some agreements prevented authorities from prosecuting officers for crimes unearthed by internal investigations.
- Rusch and Smith identified 49 officers “who, on the verge of being ousted for alleged misconduct, were allowed to walk away with their wrongdoing hidden and collect lifetime disability pensions for injuries their own employers had challenged as unsubstantiated.” Those 49 officers collected a combined at least $23.9 million in disability pensions after claiming to have developed disabling conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and stress-induced hypertension.
- After signing clean-record agreements, most officers got new jobs, usually as police officers, corrections officers or security guards. Many were accused of misconduct in their new positions. Five officers who secured new jobs in law enforcement continued to collect disability pensions.
The impact of their work
Soon after the series ran, hundreds of readers demanded that state lawmakers prohibit clean-record agreements. he California Public Employees’ Retirement System launched investigations into each of the 49 disability pensions that Rusch and Smith identified in their series. Meanwhile, several officers featured in the series were fired from their jobs.
Last month, a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would prohibit legal agreements to conceal police officers’ misconduct records.
Advice for other journalists
The Journalist’s Resource asked Rusch and Smith what advice they would offer other journalists interested in pursuing similar projects. They offered many suggestions and insights, which we synthesized into these four tips.
1. Check different types of government records for the information you seek.
Although some of the documents the journalists obtained contained details about the agreements officers had made with their employers, many did not. Some were also heavily redacted. That meant Rusch and Smith had to find other ways to track down information about these agreements, the officers who signed them and what they had sought to hide.
“We tried to be extremely creative about how we got after the information and how we would find the sources who would know the most about this,” Smith says.
Government records that offered lots of useful information:
- Pension payment records.
- Procedural forms that local governments filled out to approve officers’ pensions.
- Adjudicated workers’ compensation claims.
Rusch says she read adjudicated workers’ compensation claims to find details about police officers’ claims that they had been injured at work. These documents, which typically include a judge’s written review of the evidence presented, contain lots of information about an employee’s relationship with an employer, she notes.
It’s a record she says she wishes she had known about earlier — and one she now relies on regularly, even when she is not researching workplace injuries.
“I do it in every single situation,” Rusch says. “They give you insight into a company or the person. There’s a lot of narrative in these documents. I think they are underutilized.”
2. Follow up on public records requests with a personal phone call.
Clean-record agreements are meant to be secret. So, it did not surprise the journalists that some government officials in charge of public records were either unfamiliar with them or resisted sharing them. Either way, that meant extra work for Rusch and Smith.
Smith recommends submitting a very detailed public records request and then calling the records custodian to explain exactly what you are looking for.
“People might not know what you want, or be aware the record exists, or where to find it,” Smith says, adding that some documents might be called different things in different places.
“I remember there was a point early in the reporting process, we didn’t even know what to call these [agreements],” she says. “When we saw a reference to a ‘clean-record agreement,’ just knowing that was the name of these agreements — that was huge.”
Smith notes that making personal contact is especially important after requesting records from smaller government agencies that do not interact regularly with news reporters. A friendly conversation can help a journalist develop a relationship with a records clerk.
“I would call and say, ‘We are not trying to make your job any harder. We sent this email. Let me tell you what this is and, between you and me, what we’re looking for,’” Smith explains. “They’re getting a three-page request with bullet points. Some have never had to deal with something like this before. It sounds very official, and people don’t want to get into trouble for releasing something. A relationship eases that.”
3. Report against yourself.
In journalism, “reporting against yourself” refers to the practice of interrogating potential blind spots in a story by actively seeking out evidence that you’re wrong.
Rusch says she knows that can be scary for a journalist. Finding information that contradicts what you know about a person or topic can complicate an investigation or even sideline it. But it can also strengthen it, she points out.
“It can only enhance what you know,” Rusch says. “We’re after the truth. We are not after a version of the truth.”
Reporting against yourself can:
- Expose weaknesses in your investigation.
- Help you to examine an issue from multiple angles.
- Provide context that gives your audience a fuller understanding of an issue.
- Reveal information that bolsters your investigation.
- Increase your confidence in your reporting.
4. Use this series as a springboard for your own investigation of clean-record agreements in your part of the U.S.
Shortly after “Right to Remain Secret” was published, other California news outlets followed with local stories spotlighting officers with clean-record agreements in their communities. Journalists in and outside California can find story ideas simply by reading the series and studying the interactive graphics that accompany the first story.
News outlets will have free access to thousands of California police records going back decades when a new online database launches later this year. The California Reporting Project, a collaboration of news organizations that includes UC Berkley’s Investigative Reporting Program, has worked the last several years collecting records on police use of force and allegations of sexual misconduct and dishonesty among California law enforcement officers. Rusch estimates the database will contain records representing more than 7,000 incidents.
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