Add lawsuits BPD officers have been involved in

[redshiftzero]

There are few BPD officers in the city, and adding the court documents for all lawsuits BPD officers have been involved in is a nicely scoped research task that would be really useful for the Berkeley community.

The volunteer here would need to investigate:

• [ ] Where records of these lawsuits are stored and what is required (if anything) to access them
• [ ] For each officer in Berkeley (see https://openoversight.com/department/2) find all lawsuits they are associated with
• [ ] As a staging area, we can put these links to documents in this issue (or in a Google Doc) for each officer along with a short summary of the lawsuit (optional but it would be great, we can also workshop with you if you like)
• [ ] Ask @redshiftzero to get made a temporary area coordinator on OpenOversight
• [ ] Upload the lawsuits on each profile

[red-bin]

Hi.

Based on https://www.cityofberkeley.info/uploadedFiles/Police/Level_3_-_General/GO%20C-62_05Jun24.pdf, the records can be found in a few places, but will all likely require a PRA request. Just based on this (old) document, it's likely any records'd be stored in physical form.

Place to submit PRA request to: Records Bureau Subpoena Clerk Records Bureau of the Support Services Division Court Liaison Program Coordinator "Accounting" for overtime slips.

Notes:

Criminal subpoenas for Berkeley residents from Law Enforcement agencies shall be received by the Records Bureau of the Support Services Division. The Records Bureau Subpoena Clerk shall immediately time stamp them, arrange for the preparation of a numbered report, and route them to the on duty team sergeants for service.

Subpoenaed police employees scheduled to appear for court can confirm their need to appear by checking the Court Calendar posted in the squad room and Service Bureau, (by listening to the recorded court list on the telephone); or they may contact the Coordinator between 1600 and 1630 hours the afternoon before they are scheduled to appear

A Master Court Appearance Calendar will be maintained by the CLP Coordinator and will provide current information on the status of subpoenas and court dates. The calendar will contain information concerning the status of current court cases requiring officers' appearance (e.g., going, canceled or rescheduled). (a) A telephone Court Appearance recording is available 7 days a week, 24 hours per day. The Telephone Court Appearance recording may be accessed by dialing 981 - 5990 X 7991

That number still works, and plays a recording of today's appearance requirement. Interestingly, the verbal list of required appearances often only included last name -I expect that means some data sanitization'll be needed. When asking the Records Bureau over the phone whether they maintain a historical copy of that, they said no, which is hard to believe.

All completed court overtime slips shall be routed immediately to the employee’s supervisor, then forwarded onto the Lieutenant and Captain prior to forwarding to the Coordinator. The Coordinator will initial the overtime slip and forward it to Accounting for processing.

[redshiftzero]

Great investigation - do you know where information about lawsuits where cops have been sued by someone in the public would be stored? That is the highest priority to add (maybe PACER or equivalent?)

[red-bin]

I'm not finding anything directly. There are some useful searches for court cases at the county level, but I'm not finding anything for Berkeley directly. The alameda sites might be scriptable, but you'd still have to do some post-scrape munging to remove a lot of crap - especially since the suits are not against individuals, but against the cities. Frustratingly, lots of Alameda's case/docket searches have captchas with the usual "no mining" ToS. Still, I had a whack at throwing selenium at the publicrecords.alameda.courts.ca.gov sites, but google's captcha seems to block selenium. Also, some require payment for some documents. tl;dr - it's a mess.

Nonetheless, these might be useful: A good example of a suit against the City of Berkeley, which, while thrown out, could be useful in finding other cases: https://justiceforkaylamoore.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/moore-filed-complaint.pdf

This lists the case no. of every arrest: https://data.cityofberkeley.info/Public-Safety/Berkeley-PD-Log-Arrests/xi7q-nji6/data These might be useful, but would require some scraping: https://publicrecords.alameda.courts.ca.gov/PRS/Case/SearchByCaseNumber Criminal docket finder: https://www.acgov.org/sheriff_app/docket/docketSearch.do Search by filing date: https://publicrecords.alameda.courts.ca.gov/PRS/Case/SearchByPublicReports

My money's still on a PRA request for subpoenas and their associated court cases. Those could be useful for searching through some of the tools above.

Any other thoughts?

[ssempervirens]

Hey @red-bin! My understanding is that court cases are not covered by public records laws like CPRA, because the records are already public, and just require someone to search. See: https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/2009/06/the-cpra-and-court-records/ (Please let me know if you have additional or alternative information though)

Honestly, it seems like finding relevant court records would simply require someone who is familiar with PACER or Lexis Nexis to spend some time on this. I know we had (have?) several law student contributors. This might be a good task for them?

[alankessler]

https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener keeps a caching archive of many PACER cases at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/

@mlissner and the other folks at @FreeLawProject are awesome and may have some insights.

[mlissner]

We've had a few requests for PACER data on cops. The big challenge is that the name of the cop isn't always in the case name. As a result, it's pretty hard to look up these cases:

• PACER only allows search by case name
• CourtListener, Lexis, West, Bloomberg, etc. let you do more, but they don't have every case searchable.

So you can do some digging, but it's tough. I'll add though that of the options above, you can actually search CourtListener (our tool) by API, so that can help:

https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest-info/#search-endpoint

The other thing people talk about when working on this is searching for badge numbers. My understanding is that badge numbers change seemingly at random, and I actually live in Oakland (and was in Berkeley for a decade), but I have no idea whether that happens here.

Finally, I'll just note that we do data work as part of our non-profit. In my individual capacity, I might be able to do a bulk data gathering exercise if there was some money for PACER fees. (We usually charge a minimum of $5k for this kind of work.)

[mlissner]

Sorry, just to clarify b/c I've confused at least one person. If folks wanted to work with us, I might be able to do the work pro bono, but the PACER fees would still need to get covered somehow. (And normally, when it's not pro bono, this costs around $5k + PACER fees as a starting point through Free Law Project.)