City of Azusa v. Superior Court
| Decision Date | 28 April 1987 |
| Citation | 191 Cal.App.3d 693,236 Cal.Rptr. 621 |
| Court | California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals |
| Parties | CITY OF AZUSA, Wayne Ketaily, and James Hammond, Petitioners, v. The SUPERIOR COURT for Los Angeles County, Respondent; Joseph MADRIGAL, Esperanza Madrigal, and Ruth Gonzalez, Real Parties in Interest. B 026399. |
Peter M. Thorson, City Atty., Azusa, Dennis I. Floyd, Ventura, Raymond J. Fuentes, and Burke, Williams & Sorensen, Los Angeles, for petitioners.
No appearance for respondent.
Ronald T. Vera and Barbosa & Vera, for Real Parties in Interest.
*
In this mandamus proceeding, the City of Asuza and two of its police officers challenge an order requiring the city to deliver to real parties a complete copy of the city's files on citizen complaints against the two officers.
This order was entered in a tort and civil rights action against the city and the two officers. The complaint alleges that the officers arrested the three plaintiffs without probable cause and employed unreasonable and injurious force to make the arrests, and that the city improperly trained and supervised the officers.
Plaintiffs requested the personnel files of the two officers, seeking records of training and job performance, including complaints of misconduct and resulting investigations and discipline imposed. After examining these records in chambers, as required by Evidence Code section 1045, subdivision (b), the trial court ordered that they be produced in their entirety.
This petition followed. The documents in question were lodged with this court under seal. On March 31, 1987, we temporarily stayed enforcement of the trial court's order.
The conditional privilege for official information (Evid.Code, § 1040) applies in this case, along with the provisions of sections 1045 to 1047. (See People v. Memro (1985) 38 Cal.3d 658, 689, 214 Cal.Rptr. 832, 700 P.2d 446.) Section 1040 requires the trial court to weigh the necessity for disclosure in the interest of justice against the necessity for preserving the confidentiality of the information, before determining what will be ordered disclosed. 1 The trial court should summarize its evaluations on the record or in an order, so meaningful review will be possible. Here, the record not only gives no insight into the weight the trial court attributed to the competing factors, but also does not even reveal whether the court considered them at all. 2
In addition, section 1045 explicitly requires that "where the issue in litigation concerns the policies or pattern of conduct of the employing agency"--and this is such a case, as shown by paragraphs 2, 6, and 19 of the complaint--the trial court must consider the availability of comparable information from agency sources other than personnel records. Here the city clerk declared that he maintains files, available for public inspection, on all claims against the city police department, including the written claim, the claimant's name and address, the names of the police officers involved, and a summary of the incident complained of. Whether these public files include all the incidents covered in the records the trial court ordered produced, the clerk did not specify. The trial court should, as required by statute, have considered the availability of this information, and the record does not indicate that it did.
Further, the files ordered produced contain medical records and other sensitive and personal material about individuals, including information about criminal records, suspected criminal activities, and evaluations of credibility. Bearing no relevance to the facts plaintiffs hope to discover and prove, such information should have been excised.
Indeed, at this stage plaintiffs were entitled, at most, to the names and addresses of other persons who complained the two officers had used excessive force in the course of arrests within five years preceding the plaintiffs' arrest. Pitchess v. Superior Court (1974) 11 Cal.3d 531, 113 Cal.Rptr. 897, 522 P.2d 305, the seminal case in this field, found good cause for a request for a law enforcement agency's records of complainants'...
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