We're Coming for Your Records

Words by Anna Robinson-Sweet

A protestor in New York City in June 2020.

The families of those slain by police have been at the forefront of bringing awareness and outrage to the confidentiality of police disciplinary records. The families of Ramarley Graham, who was shot and killed by the NYPD in 2012, and Eric Garner, whose murder brought thousands to the streets chanting Garner’s last words, “I Can’t Breathe,” sought and were denied access to the disciplinary records of the cops who committed these murders. In both cases their public records requests were rejected on the basis of 50-a. As Garner’s mother Gwen Carr testified in 2019, “50-a makes it close to impossible for me to truly fight for justice for Eric.”

While not every state has a 50-a, every state finds a way to stand in the way of records releases. In Los Angeles, activists have had to fight for access to LAPD records. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the LAPD in May of 2017 to gain access to records about Operation LASER, which designated certain areas of the city as “hot zones” to be targeted for higher levels of enforcement and created a list of hundreds of people deemed likely offenders, who were then stalked by police with the intention of catching them in an arrestable offense. The LAPD ignored this FOIL request, and in February 2018 the coalition filed a lawsuit accusing the LAPD of violating California’s public records law. Under this pressure, the LAPD began to release records. Over the next year, Stop LAPD Spying continually found these records releases to be incomplete and responded with further requests. In April 2019, Operation LASER was dismantled and in December of that year, thirty-one months after Stop LAPD Spying filed its first FOIL request, the names of nearly 700 people targeted by the operation were made public. 

The people on this list were identified using data and documents created and kept by the police, courts, and prisons; Operation LASER is a prime example of the way that criminality is created through records, making record keeping one of the police’s most powerful and dangerous weapons. One of the notorious records-creating tools used by the LAPD and other police departments is the Field Interview (FI) card, wherein police take down information on those with whom they interact or even observe. Neither a warrant nor consent by the subject of an FI card is needed, and the person need not have committed a crime. 

The repository for many of the LAPD’s FI cards has been California’s gang database, CalGang. People included in this database often find themselves surveilled by police and if found guilty of a crime are likely to receive harsher sentences. Long the subject of scrutiny, CalGang was the target for many Black Lives Matter demonstrators in June 2020. In response to this public pressure and in the midst of an ongoing investigation into LAPD’s use of the database, the LAPD Board of Police Commissioners issued a moratorium on new entries in CalGang. Less than a month later the California Department of Justice officially banned the LAPD from using CalGang after three officers were found to have falsified FI cards for those they entered into the database.

These recent victories came in the wake of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, but the ability of this uprising to win long-fought battles is the result of years of organizing for access to, and freedom from, the records of a racist carceral state. In New York City, the repeal of 50-a led to the release of records from the Civilian Complaint Review Board showing that one in nine NYPD officers has at least one substantiated complaint against them. These records allow us to hold individual officers accountable and, importantly, they also disabuse us of the notion that police misconduct is limited to “a few bad apples,” as the police officials, politicians, and reformers would like us to believe. 

The many campaigns to make public police records and to end record-keeping practices that criminalize communities of color amount to a movement for records justice—a movement that seeks to wrest control of record creation and retention from the carceral state. Records justice would mean an end to the double standard of record making and recordkeeping, a double standard in which police can fabricate records about us while shielding themselves from the record of their own impugnable actions. Activists have shown us that each victory that lessens this power imbalance is a step toward abolition of the police state.

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