The city’s attorney has asked for more time to release the draft
reports of a controversial police study and all city e-mails
related to that study, and it denied a third request to release the
surveys of police personnel that the study partially relied on.
The city’s attorney has asked for more time to release the draft reports of a controversial police study and all city e-mails related to that study, and it denied a third request to release the surveys of police personnel that the study partially relied on.
This is the latest development in an ongoing struggle with City Hall to release as much material as possible related to Matrix Consulting Group, an outside auditor the city paid $55,000 to analyze the Gilroy Police Department’s efficiency.
In an unusual move, the city council voted unanimously Oct. 15 to release the last two drafts of Matrix’s report, but not the first two reports because Assistant City Administrator Anna Jatczak said they did not exist because Matrix wrote over the original drafts.
But last week Matrix President Richard Brady presented his company’s fourth and final report after almost a year of research and said the first two drafts did indeed exist, contrary to statements also made by his associate. Only top-level police officials and Matrix employees saw the two preliminary reports, said City Administrator Jay Baksa, while councilmen and city administrators simply received as much as the public: the final report and its third draft.
After Brady’s presentation, though, Assistant City Attorney Jolie Houston reversed the firm’s Oct. 18 decision to deny the drafts’ release and wrote The Dispatch a letter Monday asking for more time to gather the drafts for public review by Dec. 4.
Houston and City Attorney Linda Callon did not return messages Tuesday, but in one of her letters Houston rejected the newspaper’s request to see the officers’ surveys because “these surveys are confidential and the release of them would clearly discourage discussion within the city.”
This did not make sense to Councilman Dion Bracco, though, who said the 67 police personnel who chose to fill out the surveys did so anonymously, so it would be impossible to link comments to any one particular officer.
“If they’re anonymous, they should be released. I see no reason why they shouldn’t be released because per council direction, the city attorney should be looking at ways to release stuff, not hold things back,” Bracco said. “We’ve really made an effort to make sure we’re open … If they don’t release it, I’ll go down to the city and complain to (City Administrator) Jay (Baksa) about it.”
All of this came as somewhat of a surprise to Bracco, who acknowledged Tuesday that while he had reviewed the newspaper’s PRA requests, he had not heard of or seen the attorney’s day-old responses yet.
But that was just before Tuesday afternoon, when Jatczak sent an e-mail to current and incoming councilmembers informing them of Berliner Cohen’s decisions, according to Councilman Craig Gartman.
“I was not involved in this decision at all,” said Gartman, adding that he needed to better understand exactly what confidentiality the city and Matrix promised police personnel who filled out the survey.
Byron Pipkin, a senior manager at Matrix, said the company distributed the surveys with the direction that they should remain nameless and mailed back to Matrix. The company then reviewed the results and hand-written comments and summarized them for the typed report. Nobody at the city saw the raw, hand-written surveys, Pipkin said.
In this case, Gartman said he was hesitant to release the hand-written results because sometimes identities seep through a person’s handwriting and idiosyncratic phrasings.
Jatczak agreed and said the potential for identifying officers who expect to remain anonymous jeopardizes candor within the city, but the public-records requests do not seek identities, just responses.
Still, the surveys were organized by work groups, Jatczak said, so it is feasible that if an officer’s work group was small enough and his/her penmanship unique enough, then one might be able to figure out who wrote it. She added that the city’s denial is necessary to prevent unwanted retribution if, say, top-level police officials did not like what they read and knew who wrote it.
But what is also unwanted is the city’s foot-dragging response, Gartman said. Taking until Dec. 4 to reveal the e-mails and original drafts would be nearly a month since The Dispatch’s PRA requests, and that’s too long, he said.
“I don’t see the justification of taking almost a month to do this,” Gartman said. “It doesn’t make sense, and here we are professing we want to be transparent, but our actions are not matching our words.”
Mayor Al Pinheiro supports the council’s professed desire for transparency. He said he wanted to clarify with the city attorney exactly how the release of anonymous surveys could compromise officers’ anonymity.
“If you’re OK with just the details of what (police personnel) felt and not the individual names, then I don’t see where that would be a problem, but I’m not sure anybody’s thought of that” Pinheiro said, adding that he would follow up with Jatczak.
Just the details, though – no identifiable information: That is what the city should release, according to Terry Francke, counsel for the nonprofit, open-government group Californians Aware.
“You can withhold an officer’s identity, but you don’t withhold what they say because it doesn’t make any sense to do an audit and expect it to have credibility and not disclose what was said,” said Francke, who also criticized the city attorney’s denial that relied on what he said was a misconception of court precedent and a subsequent pro-transparency referendum that challenged that precedent.
Pinheiro said he pressed his own pro-transparency opinion on city administrators and attorneys once he heard of their decision, though he was not involved in the decision-making process itself, he said.
“It’s been the direction of this council for more than a year that we want things out in the open, but at the same time, we can’t just open the flood gates and not be cautious,” Pinheiro said. “You have got to be patient with us.”
