After Bee lawsuit, Sacramento releases new videos in Darell Richards fatal police shooting
The Sacramento Police Department has released 58 new videos related to the 2018 Darell Richards fatal police shooting.
The release follows a lawsuit The Sacramento Bee filed against the city seeking records related to the shooting. Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steven M. Gevercer ruled in The Bee’s favor in August, and ordered the city to release additional items by Sept. 13.
The new videos, posted to a city webpage, include new police body camera footage from the night of the shooting, 911 calls and officer interviews. The videos total more than 30 hours of footage.
The Bee filed a public records request in September 2020 seeking all records in the use-of-force investigation into the shooting. The city withheld the documents for more than seven months.
Then in May, after The Bee threatened to sue, the city released a seven-page “administrative review” report. But the city continued to withhold more than 700 pages from a June 2020 report. That report contains statements from witnesses and relatives, officer observations, detective follow-up, forensic diagrams and autopsy findings.
After The Bee filed the lawsuit, the city released the June 2020 report and additional documents, totaling 876 pages, to its police website. It also released hundreds of photos.
Redacted within the documents were photos of Richards, his medical condition, his prior legal violations, and photos of the two officers who shot Richards. The city has now unredacted those items. The city still has to unredact the faces of several officers in the new videos, which a city lawyer said they plan to do.
“I think it was important that The Bee brought this case because, as the court found, the lengthy delays in the city producing these records violated the Public Records Act,” said Karl Olson, a San Francisco lawyer who specializes in Public Records Act litigation and represented The Bee in the lawsuit. “The Public Records Act really requires that agencies take it seriously and produce stuff very promptly and they didn’t do that and it was their delays in the face of numerous reminders from us that really forced The Bee to file this lawsuit.”
Prior to the lawsuit, the city had released 86 clips of video and audio of the incident, but no documents, despite a law the California Legislature passed in 2018 that required their release. The law, called SB 1421, the Right to Know Act, requires police agencies to release records related to the investigation and discipline of police officers when officers use force that results in serious injury or death, commit sexual assault on a member of the public, or engage in dishonesty in certain situations.
In the future, the city plans to release records more quickly, City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood has said.
“Since the issuance of this decision, the city has been working to comply with the various aspects of the court’s order,” Alcala Wood said in a statement last month. “As the city has stated before, fulfilling this public records request has taken longer than it should have, in part because of challenges created by how certain information was collected, processed and archived prior to the passage of SB 1421. Moving forward, the city remains committed to improving and strengthening its internal systems and to sharing information as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Sacramento police fatally shot Richards, a 19-year-old Black and Hmong man, on Sept. 5, 2018. At around 11:30 p.m., dispatchers received a call about a man wearing a mask and pointing a firearm at people along Broadway near Tower Cafe. More than three hours later, police found Richards hiding under a stairwell of a Curtis Park home. Richards possessed a pellet gun modeled after a 9 mm handgun and also a knife. The two officers fired shots that struck Richards seven times. He died at the scene.
Richards showed signs of suffering from mental health issues, and was scheduled for a psychiatric evaluation, his family and friends have said. Richards’ family has filed a lawsuit against the city in federal court. That lawsuit is still active.
This story was originally published September 17, 2021 at 12:08 PM.
