Two Handy Tools For Public Sector Investigations (California)
The laws applicable to the operations of public agencies create opportunities to gather evidence and information that are unique to the public sector. These opportunities can help expedite and focus investigations by narrowing the scope of interview questioning, assisting with establishing timelines, and minimizing the delays associated with document requests or personnel file review. This blog post discusses two such opportunities and the challenges they can help investigators overcome.
1. Public Meeting Agendas And Minutes
One challenge investigators invariably encounter is the limitations and quirks of human memory. For example, interviewees rarely remember specific dates, but can often roughly estimate when an event occurred in relation to another events. A witness might remember that a key event happened after a governing board voted to enact a specific policy, but before a certain board member was elected or a certain executive was appointed. Thanks to the Brown Act, investigators can usually quickly and easily determine the specific dates of these temporal time-posts.
The Brown Act (Govt. Code § 54950 et seq.), sets forth certain rules and requirements for public agencies regarding the publication of records of public meetings. In practice, most public agencies post meeting minutes, agendas, and often even video recordings of public meetings on their websites. Often, the minutes or agendas will include attachments provided to the elected or appointed decision-makers by agency staff. These materials can be mined for all sorts of useful information, such as dates of elections, appointments, policy proposals, and the names and job titles of key decisionmakers and staff. The materials can also help investigators go into interviews better informed and equipped to refresh witness recollection, ask more specific incisive questions, and spend more time focused on disputed issues and less time on gathering and verifying background information.
Investigations of politicians or top public agency executives can sometimes be challenging due to political biases. Political interests, alliances, and self-interest may skew how witnesses convey information to investigators. Video of public meetings can provide an independent, less bias-prone perspective on conduct and debate that may have occurred during public meetings. At the very least, the video or other meeting materials can establish who attended a given meeting and/or had knowledge of potentially pertinent discussions or events. These materials can also provide insight into plan and policy development and a policy’s underlying rationale if it went through multiple iterations before adoption or rejection. Access to these materials can also reduce the administrative burden of requesting documents from witnesses or agency-side administrators.
2. Public Salary Data
Another challenge investigators often face is determining how to properly identify or describe a witness or other relevant party based on incomplete information. Due to the complexity of the civil service system, labor relations, and the interplay between overlapping sets of rules, public employees commonly have multiple job titles or “job classifications” depending on the context. Additionally, as is common at larger agencies, staff may not know the full name or “official” job title of someone with whom they work infrequently. The passage of time can compound these issues in the cases of former employees no longer employed by an agency. While internal investigators can go through various internal channels and external investigators can send information requests to their client contacts to obtain this information, doing so can add delay. If obtaining this information requires involving additional staff, doing so risks invite investigation integrity issues. The more people know about an investigation, the more potential exists for witness tampering, evidence destruction, and inadvertent disclosure.
In California, the Public Records Act (Govt. Code § 7920 et seq.) via the website transparentcalifornia.com, provides a useful informational resource. Yearly, the website sends Public Records Act requests to public agencies throughout the state regarding employee pay and benefits. The website compiles and publishes the results in an easily searchable format. The website is useful tool for narrowing down dates of employment, promotions, checking the proper spellings of names, and identifying employees’ full names and job titles if you only have part of a name or job title. While investigators should be careful to independently verify any critical details before including them in a Report, checking the website can be a faster, less burdensome method of filling in gaps in information that allow an investigation to proceed.
The Takeaway
Public meeting records and aggregators of data compiled from Public Information Act requests like transparentcalifornia.com are useful sources of information that can help public sector investigations reach more timely conclusions. The investigators in the Public Sector Practice Group at Van Dermyden Makus know their way around the unique facets of public sector investigations and how to satisfy the distinct needs of public sector agencies.
