ON THE COVER
‘Utmost Transparency’ EPD texting investigation finds [redacted] officers [redacted] , [redacted] and [redacted] By Thadeus Greenson thad@northcoastjournal.com
I
The cover page and complete — and heavily redacted — table of contents from the third-party investigation into the Eureka Police Department’s texting scandal as released to the Journal following a California Public Records Act request.
12
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, April 21, 2022 • northcoastjournal.com
n the hours and days after the Sacramento Bee published a series of leaked text messages shared between a unit of Eureka Police Department officers, the exchanges were quickly decried as “vile,” “abhorrent,” “egregious” and “profoundly upsetting” by officials and entities ranging from the Eureka Police Officers Association and the then chief of police to the city’s mayor and state assemblymember. As papers across the country picked up news of the leaked text messages — which were filled with deeply misogynistic, sexist and dehumanizing messages about women and evidenced a deep contempt for homeless residents, with one officer openly joking about rounding them up to push them into a burning building or using a helicopter to decapitate them — local officials moved quickly to respond. The two officers identified as sending the bulk of the offending texts — unit supervisor Sgt. Rodrigo Reyna-Sanchez and officer Mark Meftah were placed on administrative leave, while then Police Chief Steve Watson announced the city was hiring an outside firm to investigate. Repeatedly, officials pledged to be as transparent as possible. Some 13 months later, with the investigation concluded, two officers having evaded intended discipline by retiring their posts with the city, a third having left to move out of state and two others having received unspecified “corrective action,” the public knows little more than it initially learned with the Bee’s bombshell report, which the Journal later corroborated, obtaining the leaked texts, as well as some others, through a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request. After the city announced via a one-page press release March 28 that an EPD captain and sergeant facing disciplinary action as a result of the third-party investigation had abruptly retired, effective immediately, the Journal filed another CPRA request with the city, this time seeking the full investigative report, which had cost the city more than $150,000, in addition to another $90,000 spent on outside legal review. On April 14, the city responded, saying the California government and penal codes protecting police officer personnel records
would not allow the report’s release in full. Nonetheless, City Attorney Autumn Luna wrote the Journal, “for the sake of utmost transparency,” the city was releasing a redacted copy of the report, with “all protected confidential information” removed. The heavily redacted report contains approximately 1,600 words spread across 24 pages, truncated from the original’s 191, which reportedly came to the city buttressed by hundreds of additional pages of appendices. What the city released offers very little new information about the investigation or its findings, but it does arguably illustrate the degree to which police officer personnel records are protected under state law. City Manager Miles Slattery and Mayor Susan Seaman both maintained in interviews with the Journal they wanted to release more of the report to the public but were counseled that doing so would violate officers’ legal protections, exposing the city to what Slattery said is a “mind blowing” level of liability. “I’ve said this from the beginning — we want to be as transparent as possible in this, but I also have an obligation to protect public funds,” Slattery said. And while the legal statutes in question and their application are certainly open to interpretation and argument, First Amendment Coalition Legal Director David Loy told the Journal that the city’s fear of liability is reasonable. “In fairness, they’re not wrong to be concerned with the risk of litigation for disclosure of police personnel records that must be kept secret under the law,” he said. “That’s a problem with the law, not a problem of excessive risk aversion. … The categories of police personnel records that must be kept secret by law are still quite large. The secrecy has been reduced by [recent legislation] but it’s by no means been eliminated. These are problems baked into state law.”
While the vast majority of the investigative report authored by Todd Simonson — a partner in the firm Sacks, Ricketts and Case, which the city hired to look into the texting scandal — remains shielded from
