Olivia Russo
News Editor
A bill introduced by Assemblywoman Blanca Pacheco, D-Downey, will add provisions to the existing California Public Records Act, allowing certain police officers to remove their names from public databases.
The Public Records Act was enacted in 1968, and says that any government record can be disclosed to the public as long as those specific records are requested and there are no privacy restrictions on the information.
AB1178 plans to add specific examples for the rights of police officers. Before, records of police officers were not included in the Public Records Act until 2014. Four years later, their records were made available to the public through a request.
“This is pretty straightforward,” said Daniel Ross, adjunct professor of criminal justice, said. “It will take out the identifying information regarding other officers who might be identified in records if they were procured. So it would keep the name, photography, basically anything else that would identify a cover off any offices working in an undercover assignment.”
Under this bill, anyone is allowed to make requests for any information regarding police officers, however the request could be denied.
The information and records being requested can be denied if the information: involved a police officer incident where they used force, posed a notable threat to the safety of the officer, required anything about an undercover officer who is currently on an assignment or had been on one in the past two years, and involved any officer who has received death threats themselves or their families in the past decade because of their job status.
“By increasing duties on local law enforcement agencies to redact information, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program,” according to the text of the bill.
While there is a substantial amount of information that may be redacted, the general information about police officers is still available to the public. People are still able to access the name and rank of officers if they wanted to, assuming they are not in an undercover unit.
“This bill only applied to a certain subset of records, but disclosed about a certain subset of incidence,” David Lloyd, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said. “It doesn’t in any way change the general right to disclosure of names and salaries and photos of people working for the government. Nor does it change the authority of agencies to redact or withhold that information.”
While those in the government agencies do not see this bill as a threat, others who have used the Public Records Act, like University of La Verne alumnus and freelance journalist Ben Camacho, see this bill as a threat to their project and the rights of citizens.
Throughout 2023 Camacho dealt with two lawsuits from the city of Los Angeles regarding his creation of a database to display the name, rank, salary and photographs of the police officers working in the Los Angeles Police Department. The records were legally obtained under the public records act, but Camacho was sued for publishing them anyway.
“I think the impact of having these photos out there really is like a ground level impact,” Camacho said. “And what I mean by that is I’ve had families come up to me afterwards and say thank you. And it’s like there’s this really kind of like raw human-like sense of closure that people get when they can see someone who harmed them, because prior to this, it was a secret.”
With the introduction of this bill, Camacho is now worried that if any other person requests their police officers’ records they will be declined and any updates they attempt to make to the database will also be declined.
The bill is currently being considered by the Assembly Committee on Public Safety before it goes to the state Senate for review.
Olivia Russo can be reached at olivia.russo@laverne.edu.
Olivia Russo is a senior journalism major with a concentration in print/online journalism and a minor in criminology. She is the Editor-in-Chief for the Campus Times for Spring 2026. She has previously served as the News Editor, LV Life Editor, a photographer and a staff writer for the Campus Times, as well as a staff writer and photographer for La Verne Magazine.
