The UC Faculty San Diego Association calls on the Systemwide Academic Senate and the UC San Diego Division Senate in the spirit of shared government and responsibility to the California public. On May 12, 2020, Voice of San Diego reported “UC Campuses Have Disclosed Virtually No Records Under Police Transparency Law.” We encourage you to read the article in its entirety.
Gabriel Schneider, a journalist and alumnus of UC San Diego, filed requests for information about police uses of force over a 49 year period, as is his right under the California Public Records Act. Across all campuses, only three campuses responded to PRA 2019-069 with any records. Of the three campuses that responded, each offered only one incident report. That totals three incidents. In a 49 year period.
Doesn’t make sense, right?
The response flew in the face of what was already known to the public. In 2013, UCLA police slammed David Cunningham III, the former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, onto the hood of his own car over a seat belt violation. (Cunningham, not surprisingly, is black.) That incident was reported in the press and acknowledged by UCLA. That incident report was, of course, not given to Schneider.
Schneider found further evidence suggesting campuses supressed records. The Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing published a 2019 report that included analyses of use of force data across campuses. The data accessed by the task force is precisely the kind of data that campuses should provided Schneider in response to PRA 2019-06-14. Seeing the task force report of over 80 instances of injury, Schneider filed a second public records request 2019-06-14 seeking the police incident reports for uses of force reported to the task force. UC turned over a spreadsheet condensing 230 incidents between 2016 and 2017. Among these incidents were bean bag contusions, broken limbs, and bleeding from the nose and mouth. It is difficult to understand how a campuses failed to turn over full incident reports for these events in response to PRA 2019-069. The wounding of people on our campus should matter to all of us.
UC San Diego, our own campus, is part of the problem. We am deeply concerned our campus police was among those who provided no records in response to Schneider’s request. Transparency and public accountability are cornerstones of our duty to our students and the state. Studies document again and again that police disproportionately stop, search, and commit violence against black and latinx people. Incident reports pertaining to use of force on our campuses are a keystone of holding ourselves accountable for the welfare of our entire campus community. Not one more person should die at the hands of the police as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Tony McDade did.
Our Academic Senate’s duty of shared governance begins with oversight. We urge you to press campus police departments to reinvestigate and locate all records that could conceivably be of interest to the public in reponse to PRA 2019-069. Enclosed, you will find UCSD’s response to PRA 2019-069.
The California Public Records Act, like the Freedom of Information and the Freedom of Information Privacy Acts, are hard won anchors of a functioning democracy. For two reasons, these records requests are as much part of the public function of our university as the research and teaching we do. First, we serve California and are significantly sustained by public funds. The power of public can only be honed and improved by the attentiveness of alumni and journalists like Schneider who have a stake in strengthening us. Second, we are an institution dedicated to the creation of public research. We cannot, howefver, simply claim this unilaterally. We must earn that legitimacy. We earn it by allowing public oversight and deliberation over our processes. We earn it by supporting all who make knowledge, including knowledge about us. We work at the UC because we are committed to the creation of knowledge for the public. We write in solidarity with journalists and community groups who are committed to the same. PRA, FOIA, and FOIPA are crucial institutions that must be well resourced and sustained.
On June 3, the UC Senate Chairs wrote, “On all UC campuses, we must listen and, crucially, do more to combat systemic oppression, including anti-black racism.” We applaud this call and here offer the Senate its chance to do more. We are always legally obligated to address public records requests but the moral urgency could not be greater than to respond properly to PRA-2019’s request for use of force incident reports. Police use of force incident reports are required to understand campus welfare and the scope of racist and racialized practices on our campus. Facilitating the release of these records has never been more important. Should we refuse, we are complicit in allowing the current, intolerable state of affairs to continue.
We hope to hear from you by Wednesday morning letting me know how you plan to proceed. Should we not hear a response by noon, we will publish this letter on the UCSDFA website so this issue can enter a wider debate. These are important times and we must fulfill our public responsibilities. And we must make sure relevant policing units on each campus fulfill theirs.
University of California, San Diego Faculty Association