In 2019, reporters Katey Rusch and Casey Smith began investigating California law enforcement agencies during their second year of graduate school at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. They uncovered systematic patterns of misconduct masked under the guise of “clean-record agreements” that offer payouts to officers and perpetuate a cycle of corruption.
Five years later, the pair found that 163 police departments in California had entered into these agreements with roughly 300 officers. 108 of them were hired by other departments after being terminated for wrongdoing. Rusch and Smith’s exposé led to more than a half-dozen officers losing their jobs, losing their license, being investigated for license revocation or being removed from consideration for a chief position. Their findings were published in the two-part series “Right to Remain Secret.”
Today, they were awarded the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Journalism, the largest journalism prize in the country, during a ceremony at USC’s Wallis Annenberg Hall. In a partnership of over 35 years, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Ring Foundation have annually awarded investigative journalists $50,000 for high-impact work.
“Selden Ring is the first to announce during the award season and really solidifies that the work that you did, other people read it and found value in it,” Rusch said. “After working five years on one particular thing, that feels really gratifying.”
Rusch said in an interview with Annenberg Media that community impact was a top priority for the reporters throughout their project. They discussed how the “clean-record agreements” were costing taxpayers, unbeknownst to them, hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to fund these confidential agreements. The pair said they believe it was their journalistic responsibility to share this open secret that has been a common practice for decades.
“We felt it was vitally important that if the taxpayers are paying people to execute these agreements, that the taxpayers are expecting to be protected, that we have a duty as journalists to expose what was happening in those communities,” Rusch said.
The pair recognizes that more work needs to be done, and their reporting can shed light on other agencies within California and nationwide.
Smith said she is looking forward to the opportunity to continue this reporting elsewhere, whether it is these agreements or not. Some states have legislation in place that attempts to address this unlawful behavior.
Rusch is following a bill recently introduced to the California legislature by an assembly member from Los Angeles in February. The bill nullifies confidentiality terms that date back to when the agreements were signed. It also prohibits the terms of the “clean-record agreements” to be used in future agreements.
According to Rusch and Smith, they sent out thousands of inquiries for interviews and records and a third of the agencies did not hand over their agreements. Now, Rusch is also working with the American Civil Liberties Union to legally challenge departments who refused to release their agreements, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, one of the largest police departments in the state.
“Investigative reporting is not easy, and it’s not easy as a working journalist to get time to do everything that it takes, to turn every page, to do 250 interviews, to dig deep into a system, to not just report at the surface level,” Smith said. “This project took so long, and it involved so much, you know, boots on the ground, phone calls being made, records being requested. That’s what was able to uncover a system.”
Rusch works at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program as a data journalist and records request manager. Smith is a States Newsroom reporter for the Indiana Capital Chronicle.