Editorial: Don't let lobbyists detain right to see cops' pay

The city of Sacramento spends 30 percent of its budget ($129.8 million of $431.2 million) on the Police Department. And salaries account for 90 percent of Police Department costs, which is typical for California cities.

Police officers are public employees, paid with public tax dollars, and California taxpayers have a right to know the salaries and dates of employment of police officers so they can effectively hold city and state officials accountable.

The California Public Records Act gives the public access to this information, and the California Supreme Court has affirmed public access in its decisions. In fact, the court ruled last August that "the public's legitimate interest in the identity and activities of peace officers is even greater than its interest in those of the average public servant" because officers enforce the laws of the state.

Yet public access to information about police costs and activities is threatened by the tactic of adding unrelated, stealth amendments to a bill. In this case, Assembly Bill 1855 originally dealt with interrogation of police officers under investigation. But, as reported in the Contra Costa Times, a police lobbying group, the Peace Officers Research Association of California, is hawking amendments that would reverse state Supreme Court decisions affirming the public's right to names, badge numbers, salaries and dates of employment.

These amendments are still a work in progress and have not yet been placed in the bill, according to the staff of the bill's author, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge. No final amendments have yet been agreed upon.

So legislators and the public still have time to kill this misguided effort to withhold public information.

The fact is that police officers operate in public. As the court has written, "Police officers release their names when they put on their uniforms, pin on their badges and name tags, and appear in public each day."

Of course, personal information (such as addresses, family members and medical history) of police officers is – and should remain – confidential information under existing law.

The same goes for the names of undercover police officers. As the court has written, anonymity is essential to the job of undercover agents and "the means for protecting such officers is to segregate the information relating to them from the records that are disclosed."

Since the effort to change the law has been exposed, Portantino's staff says that what the assemblyman really wants to do is "craft a set of amendments to this bill to specifically protect the identities of undercover officers." But the law and court interpretation already does that. This is an effort in search of a problem.

Police officers, and other public employees, might prefer that information about their jobs or earnings not be public information. But trends in hiring and firing affect public safety, and public employee salaries are a public expense. The people of California have a legitimate right to examine those records to monitor the conduct of public business.

To assure continued public access, the public and legislators who care about open government should watch amendments to Portantino's AB 1855 very, very closely.