Two investigations by UC Berkeley Journalism alums, whose award-winning work was developed at the Investigative Reporting Program, led to two bills signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom last week.
Brian Howey’s (’21) investigation “We Regret to Inform You,” published by Reveal/Mother Jones and the Los Angeles Times in 2023, uncovered the deceptive and routine police practice of mining family members for information about a loved one before divulging that he or she was killed or injured at the hands of the police. The story led to California’s AB572, sponsored by Assembly Member Ash Kalra, which restricts the practice and will be reflected in California police department policies by January 2027.
Katey Rusch (’20) and Casey Smith’s (’20) “Right to Remain Secret” investigation, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, revealed the police practice of using so called “clean records agreements,” to conceal police misconduct and abuse, enabling some officers to move from department to department without their full record following. The bill, AB1388, spearheaded by Assembly Member Isaac Bryan, will make these agreements illegal in California as of January 1, 2026.
“These two projects — and the legislation they’ve provoked — are a reminder that powerful investigative reporting doesn’t just illuminate abuses of power but it often spurs reforms aimed at ending those abuses,” said David Barstow, chair of the UC Berkeley Journalism Investigative Reporting Program. “They are also yet another demonstration of the incredible investigative storytelling our Berkeley Journalism students are consistently producing.”
Both pieces of legislation promise greater transparency in policing in California.
“What makes this legislation powerful is that it doesn’t just stop the practice going forward — it peels back the curtain on what’s already been done,” said Rusch, explaining that past records of police misconduct or abuse that were sealed will now be accessible through a new police records database spearheaded by the IRP along with journalists and data scientists. “That’s accountability, not just reform.”
In a story by Rusch in the San Francisco Chronicle about the passage of the bill, George Parampathu, a legislative attorney with the ACLU, said the law will put “public safety over the police lobby’s self-interest” and ultimately help protect communities.
Rusch, who manages public records requests at Berkeley’s IRP, has written a series of stories based on these clean-records agreements, including a recent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that showed how an Oakland officer who was associated with infamous Riders (a group of rogue Oakland police officers who allegedly framed and brutalized residents some 25 years ago) later turned up in Boston as an FBI agent and killed an associate of the Boston Marathon bombers during an interrogation.
‘It beats the hell out of any journalism award.’
Rusch said that for too long, police departments have “quietly erased misconduct,” which hurts relationships with communities by undermining public trust.
Trust is a major theme in Howey’s investigation into deceptive police interrogation tactics. The story, which he began in 2020 as a student in Barstow’s investigative class, revealed how California law enforcement officers routinely withheld death notifications from families while they gathered disparaging information on victims of police violence.
Howey’s investigation recounted the story of 19-year-old Diana Showman who was shot by police in 2019 after she pointed a cordless drill at police officers that she had said was an Uzi. As detailed in a lawsuit, San Jose police officers interviewed Showman’s father in an interrogation room just after the shooting and asked him to divulge information about his daughter’s mental health history without telling him that she had died several hours before.
The deceptive practice was championed by a well-known police trainer, Bruce Praet from the firm Lexipol, and proliferated through additions to police manuals and via webinars. While it is used widely in California, it’s not believed to be common in other states, Howey said.
Howey said he has talked to family members subjected to this tactic since the law passed, and they told him the legislative victory was a good step forward but they also felt there was more to do.
“For them, it’s just a small drop in a big bucket of injustice, and the fight for police accountability is an uphill battle,” Howey said.
Still, he said, the result as far as journalism goes is “the best thing you can possibly hope for out of this work. It beats the hell out of any journalism award.”
Both stories did win multiple journalism awards, including Polk Awards. Rusch, Smith and the Investigative Reporting Program itself were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize this year for “Right to Remain Secret.”
Howey said the passage of the legislation is what he envisioned when deciding to become a journalist and is what motivates him to keep reporting.
“It’s really easy to feel despair at this moment when the world is going to hell and the journalism industry is falling down around us,” he said. “This is proof that our work is more essential than ever and that it does have an impact.”
