Perhaps you, like me, were surprised to learn LAPD shredded 4 tons of citizen complaints against officers. And that it led to California becoming the nation’s most secretive state on police misconduct. How did it happen? 🎵A trip to the archives🎵 (1/12) latimes.com/politics/la-me…
In 1974, the California Supreme Court decided that criminal defendants had a right to examine the history of the officers that arrested them to question their credibility on the witness stand. This, of course, led to defense attorneys asking for these files all the time. (2/12)
LAPD officers became upset — especially because the requests covered complaints that the department had deemed invalid. Morale was down, per this LAT article from the time. (3/12) 
In response, over two days in May 1976, the LAPD shredded all such complaints spanning 1949 to 1974. It was 5.5 million pages, weighing four tons, that were destroyed. (4/12)
The decision set up a huge fight between two men with Extremely ‘70s Haircuts. Municipal Court Judge George W. Trammel who said what happened should “shock the conscience” and City Attorney Burt Pines who blessed the shredding. (5/12)
Ultimately, the shredding scandal led to more than 100 criminal cases being thrown out because defendants couldn’t get the evidence that had been destroyed. But no one was criminally charged for what happened. Everyone was frustrated, per this 1979 LAT story. (6/12)
The shredding scandal led to another state Supreme Court decision. In 1980, the court ruled that destruction of evidence deprived defendants of a fair trial. Here’s the decision. scholar.google.com/scholar_case?c… (7/12)
By that point, the Legislature had passed a law requiring police departments to preserve misconduct records. Of course, the same law locked those files away from the public and made them hard to get in court. How hard? Check out our interactive game latimes.com/projects/la-me… (8/12)
Amazingly, legislative committee analyses in both the state Assembly and Senate cited the shredding scandal as a reason why the 1978 police records confidentiality law was needed. (9/12)
The ACLU realized what the bill was going to do. They didn’t support it (10/12)
But the argument for confidentiality won the day and the bill passed the Legislature unanimously. Here’s how advisers to @jerrybrowngov — he was the governor back then, too! — described the bill. Brown signed it. (11/12)
And so the legacy of that 1978 law, especially as it has been interpreted by the courts over the years, is that California has the strictest prohibitions in the country against releasing police misconduct information to the public. (FIN/12)
