Throughline - Bonus: On Our Watch

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

What happens to police officers who use excessive force, tamper with evidence or sexually harass someone? In California, internal affairs investigations were kept secret from the public — until a recent transparency law unsealed thousands of files. Listen to the first episode of On Our Watch, a limited-run podcast from NPR and KQED that brings you into the rooms where officers are interrogated and witnesses are questioned to find out who the system of police accountability really serves, and who it protects.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Hey everyone, we love showcasing work from our colleagues, and today we've got a really great episode to share with you from the series On Our Watch. It looks at what goes on behind the closed doors of internal police misconduct investigations. It comes from a partnership with NPR and member station KQED. Which is where our editor, Julie Kane, worked before coming to ThruLine. Julie, along with our former boss, Nigery Ian, brought the show to NPR. And one of the show's producers, Sandhya Dirks, just joined the race and identity desk at NPR. And Ramtin wrote the theme song and a bunch of other music for it. Lots of shared connections.

So we wanted to make sure you get a chance to check it out. When we come back, episode one of On Our Watch. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Police Department. Did you call 911 again, Catherine? Yes, I did. Okay, what was the issue? My car again.

Okay. We've been to your house. This is the second time tonight. Yes, it is, sir. It's September 30th, 2018. It's still dark outside around 3 o'clock in the morning in this little town called Rio Vista, which is in the Sacramento Delta region of Northern California.

A 56-year-old white woman named Catherine Jenks has called 911. Two cops are now at her door, their body cameras rolling. And that's what you're here for, is to serve me and protect me? No. A warning, this story contains explicit language and audio of a violent interaction with police. Your progression of calling 911 over the past couple weeks have been... Let me finish. Okay, you've called 911.

Why do I have to hear you? You're supposed to hear me. No, I'm telling you that... Over the past week, Katherine Jenks has called 911 about seven times. And each time, when officers arrived, there didn't appear to be an emergency going on. And you're falsely reporting... You know what? Wait a minute. Let me get my shit in here, okay?

If you're calling 911 to report something that's not of an emergency, that's a crime. It's an emergency. She insists, and it sounds like she believes that there is an emergency. But whatever fears she has, the two police officers who have been dispatched, Man Lee and Natalie Rafferty, don't think there's any evidence for them. Okay, it's evident that... The times that we've been here have not been an emergency. On an earlier call, Lee and another officer had talked about bringing this woman in for a psychiatric hold.

But instead, they just gave her a warning. Okay, well, excuse me. This time, the cops do something different. No, don't push me out there. Catherine. Yeah? I'm going to need you to put your hands around your back, okay? Why?

Because. Officer Man Lee reaches for his handcuffs. We're going to arrest you. Stop resisting, okay? We're going to arrest you. Put it, okay? We're going to arrest you. It's okay. Just push your hands over your back. God damn it. No.

Stop it. Stop picking me. Stop resisting. Don't. This woman, Catherine Jenks, is very slight. She's 56 years old and maybe 115 pounds. We're going to arrest you. Put it back. We're going to arrest you. Dave.

She calls out for her partner, Dave, who lives with her. His full name is David O'Reilly. Leave her alone. Go inside. Stop biting me. You haven't done anything. I haven't done anything. Ow. Stop kicking me. Happy, stop. What are you doing? I don't know! What are you picking on her for?

Sir, go back inside your house. Sir, go back inside your house now. No! In the video, you can see her sit down on her butt on the front step of the porch. Okay, hon, you need to stand up. We're not going to drag you. To use her body weight to kind of resist being taken into custody. Can you understand what we're telling you? You hear the officer's police dog barking in the back of the patrol car, and then suddenly that sound

gets closer. There's a button on Rafferty's belt so that she can remotely release the dog from the back of the car if she gets in trouble. Somehow, it gets pushed in the struggle with Catherine Jenks. The dog lunges out of the darkness. It attacks Catherine Jenks and bites down on her arm. Help! Get him off of me! He's not on you. Oh my God, no!

Oh, my God, David! I'm Suki Lewis, and I'm a criminal justice reporter. So when there's a police incident where it seems like something went wrong, like officers hurt someone by mistake or shot someone who's unarmed or lied about an arrest, it's my job to ask questions about what happened and ask if there'll be any consequences for officers. Usually I get a standard official reply of, you know, we're going to find out what happened. I am concerned by the actions of some of our officers. We're going to handle it. I will absolutely look at the case in its entirety.

Just trust us. We have opened an internal affairs investigation into this. An internal affairs investigation. That's how departments look into cops who break the rules. It's how they hold themselves accountable. And it's an incredibly secretive process, especially here in California. As a reporter, I never got to know if a cop was disciplined. I never got to know the story behind those official responses

or if this whole system really works at all. And victims of police brutality and the family members of people killed by police couldn't get the answers they were looking for. Even prosecutors and defense attorneys couldn't get these files. Until that all changed. The same day that Katherine Jenks was arrested, the governor signed a police transparency law. The Right to Know Act, or Senate Bill 1421, would basically allow public access to a very narrow set of records. Records related to the use of serious or deadly force, on-the-job sexual assault,

or on-the-job dishonesty. This change in the law promised to do something extraordinary. Open up thousands of internal case files, body camera footage, and audio tapes that would give us a window into this shadow system of police accountability. And let us see inside confidential internal affairs investigations that the officers thought would never be open to the public.

There have not been cover-ups. I mean, the cover-ups are, frankly, very, very rare in my experience. But actually getting those records from every police department in the state is a fight that's still not over. A fight to figure out just what those police chiefs and city officials meant when they said, trust us, how well police police themselves, and who is hurt when they don't.

When this transparency hits and you can see the internal investigations, what you see is that there are officers who lie. And the first records that we got, the internal affairs investigation into an arrest that went sideways. The arrest of Catherine Jenks. She was calling them for help, and they ended up brutalizing her and taking her to jail.

I think it's messed me up a little. Can you see how the words that you put into this report appear that you're trying to elevate the situation. She was not just passively resisting. She was kicking and biting officers. This is On Our Watch, an investigative podcast from KQED and NPR. Over the course of this series, we're going to bring you into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system really serves and who it protects. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else.

Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. It's late 2018, just over a month since Katherine Jenks was booked into jail for allegedly harassing 911 and resisting arrest. The district attorney has filed criminal charges against her, and she's still recovering from a wound to her arm. The police dog bit through her skin and subcutaneous tissue. But what Catherine doesn't know is that the Rio Vista police chief has raised some serious concerns name is Mark Siemens. The chief hired this outside investigator, named Mark Siemens, to look into the actions of officers Mann Lee and Natalie Rafferty. This inquiry is focused on issues surrounding the arrest of Catherine Jinks on September 30th.

I reached out to Mann Lee and Natalie Rafferty multiple times, and they didn't want to talk to me. But you will hear their voices in these tapes that we got from the internal investigation. Please state your full name and spell your last name for the record. Natalie Rafferty, R-A-F-F-E-R-T-Y. Tapes like these have been secret in California since the 1970s. Each year, thousands of complaints are filed

against police officers in the state, you know, either by members of the public or from within the department. And Internal Affairs is the system for looking into these complaints. In this case, the chief asks the investigator to figure out how the dog got out of the car and also why the incident reports aren't matching up with the video of what happened that night. Since this investigation is related to police reports and entering false information into a police report is a criminal offense, I want to advise you of your rights. And I want to be clear to you that you're not being charged with a crime at this time. Okay? Okay. Rafferty tells the investigator she's worked for Rio Vista for about three years.

She's a canine officer, which is why there was a police dog in the car the night they showed up at Catherine Jenks' house. At the time that you were making the arrest of Mrs. Jenks, or Miss Jenks, I'm sorry, did she appear to be thinking clearly and rationally? I don't know. I think that's a matter of opinion. Was there any indication that she had some mental health issues? There may have been. I think it would be dependent. I mean, I'm not sure. During that call, was there ever any dialogue between you and the other officers about her being 5150?

5150 is a psychiatric hold. I don't think so. I think we might have called her crazy, but I don't know if that was even what we said. In fact, other officers had talked about taking Katherine Jenks in for a psychiatric hold on a previous call, but they didn't. Instead, Rafferty and Lee decided that if she called 911 again, they were going to arrest her. And what kind of plan did you make before you left? We planned that if we went there and there was no emergency and Jenks had called again, 911, then we would arrest her. Here's where this case echoes some of the high-profile police incidents across the country. Officers show up at a scene where there's someone who they know or suspect is in mental distress.

But they still do what they're trained to do, enforce compliance with their commands, or make an arrest. Things don't go as planned, and sometimes the person gets injured or even killed. But this case also has some key differences. Katherine Jenks is a woman. She's white, and this incident leads to consequences

not just for the officers, but for the entire department. And before I knew what had happened, my canine was biting her right forearm. This wasn't just a dog bite. Photographs of her injury show the dog's teeth punctured both sides of her forearm, ripping up the soft tissue of her arm straight through to the bone. But Rafferty tells the investigator Mark Siemens that part was a mistake. The dog was never supposed to get out. She thinks that during the struggle that Katherine Jenks accidentally hit the button that released the dog. I know that I didn't press the button myself.

The investigator can't determine for sure what happened with the dog, but he does not conclude that Rafferty is lying about it. What he does question is whether this terrible accident led the officers to exaggerate and even falsify some of the details of the incident in their reports. Like what they wrote about Katherine Jenks biting them when they first started to arrest her. It says, based on my training and experience,

I know a bite from a human can cause serious injury and or infection due to bacteria and viruses in the human mouth. Why did you put that sentence in there? Because I believed it was important to document that. Katherine Jenks did try to bite the officers on the hands, which they documented in photographs. These photos show that she didn't break their skin, and she barely left a mark.

But they booked Jenks for felony resisting arrest. And the internal report shows that one of the reasons they gave was that those bites could be a deadly threat. Ladoris Cordell served as police auditor for the city of San Jose. She says in that role, she saw resisting arrest charges all too often used as a cover by officers who use unnecessary force. And the officers will sometimes actually yell it, stop resisting, when the person's not resisting. But they want people around to hear that so that they can get support for, yeah, he was resisting. She's also a retired Superior Court judge. And when the officer would take the witness stand

and testify and the defendant resisted, I would look over and most frequently the defendants were black and brown males for the most part. And they would just sit there and just shake their heads. But she says when cases like those made it into her courtroom,

it was often the official story, the cop's testimony, that won out. I am not saying that every single report that was written up about resisting arrest is falsified. I'm not saying that at all. But does it happen? I believe it does. Most of the time, the department doesn't ask questions about how that official story got built. But in Rio Vista, the investigator Mark Siemens presses Rafferty and not just about the details she included in her report, but also why she made changes to Officer Lee's report.

Okay, I want to hand you a couple of emails. He asks why she edited Lee's report to make it seem like Katherine Cenk's boyfriend, David O'Reilly, was a big threat. Officer Lee believed that Mr. O'Reilly was just questioning officers regarding why Jenks was being arrested. And you changed it to be yelling at us in an aggressive manner. Is that what you saw on the tape? I suggested to Officer Lee, based on what occurred at the time and what I experienced and what I believed he experienced, he was free to write the report however he perceived the incident. This was merely a suggestion. I've seen these reports.

She added in words like aggressive and yelling, and she even added in a line that claimed Lee was scared that O'Reilly was going to interfere with the arrest. So, at what point did Officer Lee express to you that he feared that O'Reilly might attempt to prevent Jenks from being taken into custody? I don't know if we had that discussion or not. Okay, so we have the video up right now. Investigator Siemens then plays back the video of the interaction between Lee and O'Reilly. What's going on? Okay, I'm going to explain to you. Over the past couple weeks,

Catherine has been calling 911 to report non-emergency-related incidents. So in Gavri's art... Somebody's been messing with her car. No. We've responded multiple times, and we've found that that's untrue. We've explained it to her already, and we've warned her not to abuse 911.

You can't arrest her for that. Yes, we can. It's against the law to abuse emergency services. You can't take my wife, my baby in like this. She hasn't done anything. Sir, I explained to you. You're going to arrest her for calling 911 and treat her like this? No, that's a different. When we call 911 to report an emergency, an emergency has to happen.

Okay? Wait a minute. What are you doing? Well, I've got a cat here. I don't want her to get out. Okay. Come on in. Talk to me in here. Okay. Well, I don't want you to close the door. Okay. Put the lights out. So, I don't want you to close the door.

Okay. Put the lights out. So, I wanted to ask you about a couple of things. My colleagues and I also watch these body cam videos. And while O'Reilly sounds concerned, even emotional at times, at no point does he appear to be aggressive or threatening. Can you see how others watching the video and reading Lee's report, where Lee's report actually matches the video, that he was questioning, why are you taking her into custody? He didn't

appear to be aggressive to most people that watched, not to me, as I watched the video. He was standing in the doorway. In fact, he actually told Ms. Jinks to stop. Stop it. To stop resisting. So, can you see how the words that you put into this report appear that you're trying to elevate the situation? And most people jumped to the conclusion that that was to justify what happened. The investigator questions Rafferty about all these discrepancies and if they were added to justify the felony charge that Jenks was booked under.

It's a pretty serious charge, generally used for people who pose a real violent threat to officers. I think that there are different perspectives. And your perspective is going to be from a nice calm room and there's nobody around you. You know, there's nobody that you fear about take your gun or questioning your authority, refusing your commands. So, yeah, I can see how your perception of what you watch is going to be different than me in the moment being there and experiencing that, where I have all of these thoughts going through my head and all of these concerns and my attention being diverted in different ways. And I'm dealing with a person who's resisting me and trying to bite me. And I'm thinking, you know, this guy who's right here, right next to my gun, he's obviously

in some kind of a domestic relationship with her. Is he going to try to fight us now? He's much bigger than I am. Is he going to try to get her out of our custody? I have a lot more to question and deal with than you in a nice, comfortable setting already knowing the outcome. The point that Rafferty is making here is that you can't look back on one of these incidents

and really know what was going on subjectively for an officer. That's true. You can't know what it was like to be in these really intense moments where officers have to make split-second decisions. And she's saying it's not fair to come back and second-guess them later on. But Rafferty did not write her report in the heat of the moment. She wrote it in a nice calm room, already knowing the outcome. A police report is not a neutral document. It's a story crafted from details, included or omitted, that can be used to

support criminal charges. Charges on the basis of which people can lose their liberty. The investigator found that the details Rafferty decided to include, the danger of the human bite, the threat of David O'Reilly, weren't true, and were inserted into that story to support the felony charge and to cover up for the fact that Jenks got so badly injured by the dog bite during the arrest. Rafferty contested those findings, and she'd later appeal. But the question that seemed most important to the investigator, why did they even decide to arrest Jenks in the first place?

Rafferty and Lee already had questions about her mental health. They thought something wasn't right. But the investigator found they showed up at her front door with a plan already in place, a plan to arrest her. What do you believe she had done? I'm sorry? This is Officer Man Lee. What do you believe she had done that deserved to be arrested for? Violating 653X. What are the elements of 653X? So I can read it to you, person who telephones or using electronic communication device. Penal code section 653X

says someone who calls an emergency line with the intent to annoy or harass is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail. Nothing in this section shall apply to telephone calls or communications using electronic device made in good faith. Okay. What does that mean? So, intent to annoy or harass the other person. What does the last sentence mean? Nothing shall apply to calls made in good faith. This shall not apply. So if she were to call for an active emergency

or believe the one has happened, I believe that would be in good faith. What the investigator is pointing out here is that there has to be an intent to harass. If someone believes they're calling 911 for an emergency, they can't or shouldn't be arrested. Siemens points out that Katherine Jenks clearly felt there was an emergency going on, even if no emergency existed.

So if she just, if she believed that something was going on, that's good faith? Sure, yeah. Okay. The investigation found that they never should have arrested her in the first place. The police chief, Dan Daly, sustained, which is like a guilty determination, the investigator's findings that Rafferty had falsified police reports and falsely arrested Jenks, and he fired her. He also said Officer Man Lee was let go.

Man Lee and Natalie Rafferty both declined to talk to me about this decision. Lee was still on probation as a new officer, so his firing was final. It turned out Rafferty's was not. My arm sure hurts. Yeah, it still hurts, yeah. You want to see what it looks like? Sure. It's January 2019, about four months since the night of Catherine Jenks' arrest,

and a couple of my colleagues talk to Catherine and David in their living room. You know, I'm an older guy. I'm 73 years old. And I grew up in the 50s and the 60s, and that's what you thought about police. You respected them. Little kids, they wanted to be a cop or a fireman or something like that, you know, because they respected them. But these people here, they don't deserve much respect to treat a woman this way. You see her. She's not a very big woman. David and Catherine sit side by side on their couch. David's got his arm tucked around her. He's protective and does most of the talking during the visit. It's hard for her to talk about because it's so upsetting. I think it's messed me up a

little. Catherine doesn't really want to talk about whether she's had mental health struggles. David says she was traumatized by the arrest and that she's still dealing with an intense pain in her arm and nerve damage. She has nightmares about it still. She'll wake me up when I'm asleep because she'll be moaning and she's dreaming about the dog chewing on her arm. I see teeth. She sees the teeth.

And then I felt the burning feeling. It's just, oh. And this whole ordeal, it's not over. They were going to try to kill me. That's what I feel like the whole thing was about. And they were going to get away with it. Until we called them up, Catherine and David didn't know anything about an internal investigation,

that two officers had been fired, and that her arrest was found to be false arrest by the chief of police. In fact, Catherine is still facing criminal charges based off that same arrest. We're still in limbo over all this. I'm worried about it. For something, there shouldn't be any charges at all.

She still has court dates coming up. She's still looking at potential jail time for several misdemeanor charges. You know, I didn't realize that anybody was even aware of what's been going on here. They've been trying to cover it up. A couple days after that interview, on January 29, 2019, we published a story about the internal investigation into the arrest of Katherine Jenks. It came out in the paper, the San Jose Mercury News, and on local public radio stations. All right, can you start by telling me who you are and what you do? Yes, my name is

Sharon Henry, Chief Deputy District Attorney at the Salon of County District Attorneys. About a month after our story came out, I called up Sharon Henry, the prosecutor on Jenks' case, because she'd made a big decision. She decided to drop all the criminal charges against Katherine Jenks. This was huge, but it also raised the question, why now? And so when did you guys find out that there were kind of questions about the arrest and about the charges against Ms. Jenks? We found out about it in an article in the paper. I believe it was the San Jose Mercury News. But what Sharon Henry is saying here, that our story was the first she'd heard of any misconduct by the officers, it's not true. I later found out through emails and documents submitted in court that Henry and her boss,

the DA, had actually met with Chief Daly before we ever got the records and reported on them. In a signed declaration, the chief of police said he told the DA there were issues with the arrest, and he even asked that they consider criminally charging the officers for falsifying police reports or perjury. But the DA did not charge the officers. Instead, her office moved forward with charging Katherine Jenks with seven misdemeanors for resisting arrest and harassing 911. Just about a month ago, I reached out again to Sharon Henry and sent her the documents I'd found. I wanted to know why she'd misrepresented the timeline. We emailed back and forth, and then she stopped responding. Finally, I did get a call back from another prosecutor in her office.

I don't know why she said that. I can't tell you. This is Chief Deputy DA Paul Sequeira. And I don't know, like I said, maybe there's some nuance in the question where she felt like there's a nuance that I'm not aware of because... I mean, you're saying a lot of words here, but like, did you just ask her?

Who, me? Yeah. No, I haven't talked to her. So this is what is confounding to me. Like, presumably you knew that she, that you were going to be answering questions on her behalf for this. I'm just like. I didn't know I was going to be answering questions on her behalf until she was gone. Where is she? Well, it's a personnel matter. Okay. It's a personnel matter. I can't tell you because it's confidential. So this was incredibly bizarre. Suddenly, a week after I asked Sharon Henry to explain this discrepancy, she was just gone.

Okay. I will read back to you both my questions and her answers. I read Paul Sequeira back both my questions and Sharon Henry's responses from a transcript of our interview. Okay, that's completely inconsistent then. Yes, that is also my reading of it. It's inconsistent, and I don't have an explanation for it. Why? Because I know that we knew, and she documented that she knew back on the 12th of December. And obviously this article came out in January, January 29th.

This issue with the timeline is key, and it's not just about whether Sharon Henry lied to a journalist. District attorneys aren't supposed to be on the side of law enforcement. They're supposed to be neutral and only bring charges when they think the evidence is there. If they find evidence that someone might be innocent, they also have to pass it on to the defense, in this case, Katherine Jenks' lawyer. This is called a Brady obligation. At what point did your office let Jenks' lawyer know that there were kind of issues with this? And like, did your office fully comply with their Brady obligations? Right, we did.

I know there was an office-wide email that may have gone out. Sekira tells me that memo directing lawyers to make those Brady notifications was sent the day after our story published. It didn't come out immediately because we have to do our due diligence too. Ultimately, of course, their office did drop all the charges. Unlike Katherine Jenks, Officer Natalie Rafferty was backed by a powerful legal apparatus that's been built over the years through negotiation, lobbying, and litigation filed by California's police unions.

So when Rafferty sits down in that interview room with the investigator, she has a whole set of protections that she and all police officers in California have. She's got the right to have a lawyer with her. She has the right to get advance notice about any accusations made against her. The right to prepare for an interrogation. She even has the right not to get yelled at or sworn at. She has the right to get paid while she's under investigation, and the investigation has to wrap up within a year. After that, she's got the right to an extensive appeals process for any discipline imposed. And these rights have been state law since 1976. The L.A. Police Protective League led the charge, if you will, to get this law enacted because their officers were literally getting called into internal affairs and in some cases being physically abused, being threatened.

That's Michael Raines. He's an ex-cop himself who now runs a law firm that represents 400 different police unions in California, including Rio Vistas. So if you're an officer who's accused of misconduct or under investigation, Raines is the guy to call because he will fight and fight hard to protect those rights. I don't consider these special rights. I consider the rights they have to be due process rights that frankly any employee in any job would have, should have. Those are

all rules that pertain to, frankly, everybody in the workforce, everybody in every workforce. But do we all have these rights? Okay. That's amazing. That is great. I want you to give those same exact due process rights to the clients we represent. Brendan Woods is chief public defender for Alameda, a neighboring county in California. He's actually the only Black chief public defender in the state. He says it's not just a workforce thing. When police are accused of breaking the law, they get all these protections, unlike his clients. I want you to have an attorney right before anyone ever gets interviewed for every single person's arrested. Yeah, let's do that, okay? Let's have you wait 48 hours before you

interrogate a suspect in a crime, okay? No, they're not the same due process rights. They are heightened. The police bill of rights applies to police officers and only police officers. They have more protections than I want to say any, any occupation in the United States. No, it's not due process. Woods says he's had his own rights violated just driving down the road and being black. And so he wonders, why do officers who have the power, the discretion, to take away the rights of ordinary civilians get more protections? It should be the exact opposite.

You have someone who's trained to protect the community, someone who is allowed to carry a gun, who's weaponized, and when they do something wrong, when they abuse their power, they are given more protections than the average civilian. Policing, after all, is a job, and you should be able to fire someone who's not doing a good job. But Wood says the system as it currently is is set up to protect police officers over the public. Take what happened next with Officer Natalie Rafferty. Over the next year and a half,

she and her union lawyers wage a multi-pronged battle against the city to win her job back. Usually because of the secrecy around police personnel matters, these kinds of legal fights play out in paperwork that's filed between opposing attorneys and totally behind closed doors. Okay, moving on with the agenda, it's public comment time, so anybody from public... But one side effect of the new law is that the fight in this case becomes very public, playing out in the public comment section of city council meetings.

New law SB 1421 was used as a weapon for internal purposes. Rafferty and another officer, Calandras, were publicly shamed. On the legal side, Rafferty appeals her firing twice and sues the chief in the city for discriminating against her based on her gender. Rafferty was joined in that lawsuit by the head of the Rio Vista Police Union, a woman who was very popular with some town residents. And they started a campaign to get the chief out. We will wear shirts. We will make signs. We will bring our kids. We will make a statement and we will disrupt your status quo.

We are making it clear that if... Rafferty and her supporters said the chief was misusing the internal affairs process to get rid of anyone who challenged his authority. Thank you. Next. Daly and his supporters said he was just trying to improve this small-town police department and get rid of officers who weren't following the rules. Hi, my name is Crystal. I just want to state that I support the chief, I support the city council, and I support the citizens of Rio Vista. And as long as chief keeps doing what he's doing, I'll stand behind him. Okay, great. Thank you. Now, a lot of this devolved into small-town politics, and I'm not going to go into all of it.

There were anonymous emails, unfounded allegations. It's your reputation. And the whole mess resulted in calls to fire the city manager and the police chief. And everyone's going to talk about what an awful job you did letting this guy and that guy overrun our city. With that said, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, fuck you. We don't have this. Please remove him. Thank you.

Huh, so, anybody else wishing to follow that up with public comment? Sure. In late 2019, this campaign to get the chief out actually works. Dan Daly retires. It's a small department, only 14 officers, and Daly's departure prompts an exodus. A key number of other officers and command staff quit too. What started back in January with our request for police discipline records ends here for the chief and for the department. The city council dissolves the entire police

department. The county sheriff takes over the job of policing Rio Vista. But Rafferty's appeal to get her job back continues, and she wins. She wins at arbitration. Arbitration is this step in the appeals process where an outside person, often someone who's agreed upon in negotiations with the police union, is brought in to weigh the evidence. The arbitrator found that the chief had it out for Rafferty and that the internal investigation was biased. He said she shouldn't be fired, but he did not have the final word. Calling this meeting to order.

This is the meeting of the Rio Vista City Council's special session. On June 25, 2020, the arbitrator's decision was brought back to the Rio Vista City Council's special session. On June 25, 2020, the arbitrator's decision was brought back to the Rio Vista City Council for a hearing to either approve or overturn. The city shall reinstate Officer Rafferty, effective March 1, 2019. Natalie Rafferty does win her job back.

But the council disagrees with the arbitrator, and they do not exonerate her. They found that she and Lee made a plan to arrest Jenks before they even showed up at her house, that Rafferty put false information on police reports, and that the officers didn't have a good reason to arrest Katherine Jenks. But they decided her misconduct didn't deserve firing. They suspended her and agreed to pay her back pay. After this long legal fight, she'd won her job back, at least on paper. But because the department had been dissolved, there was no actual job to return to.

Before all this played out, before he resigned, police chief Dan Daly spoke with me about why he decided to look into what happened with Katherine Jenks. If our role in society is to hold others accountable and have them follow the laws and rules, we have to hold ourselves even to a higher standard, in my belief, and hold ourselves to a higher level of accountability. And if we're unable or unwilling to do that for ourselves, then we have no business being in the business of holding others accountable. This is a nice ideal, and I've heard it before from a lot of police chiefs. But something bugged me. Why didn't Daley and his investigator ever talk to Katherine Jenks or her partner, David O'Reilly? No, the investigator spoke to everyone that it was necessary to speak to for the investigation. And in some cases, the videos speak for themselves, and it may not be necessary

to interview someone who the information is already there on the video. Necessary. It's an incredibly telling word here. If the goal is justice for Katherine Jenks, it seems like it would be necessary to speak to her. But what if that's not the investigation's goal? What if that's not the goal of the internal affairs process at all? As I started reading through the files that came in from departments all over the state, I started finding more and more cases that really made me wonder, like, why wasn't an officer who stole an arsenal of bullets ever charged? How did a powerful detective get away with lying for

years? This didn't seem to be a system about justice, but about managing risk to the city. So you talk about the cities getting at the truth or justice. The cities basically are protecting themselves from lawsuits. They're concerned about liability. That's retired Judge Ladoris Cordell again. And what she and others explained is that the internal affairs system is basically like the investigative arm of HR. And as employers, cities are actually far more bound by their contracts with officers than to members of the public. And this started to explain why there are so many complaints and lawsuits from the public, but so few officers disciplined. What kind of system is that? That's absurd. And it should enrage anyone who pays taxes.

And it should open the eyes of anyone who is a taxpayer about how your tax dollars are being spent to basically perpetuate a cover-up of misconduct. If these records had stayed secret, this probably would have all played out very differently. Diane Daly would probably still be chief. The department would probably still exist. And Rafferty would probably still be policing Rio Vista. Katherine Jenks, on the other hand, would have probably accepted a plea deal, maybe even jail time.

I'm glad that that law is in existence and that things like this won't go covered up, you know, because they've got the upper hand as it is. Who are they going to believe if an officer tells them something? They're going to believe the officer, not the person. Here's David O'Reilly again. She's really innocent of doing anything. I love her very much. We've been together 25 years. And she means everything to me.

And if that's what transparency did in this one case, it made me wonder what had been going on in these secret investigations for all those years no one was watching. These are the stories we're going to share with you in this series. Even cases we thought we knew really well. So what happened yesterday? We shot my cousin, Oscar Grant. Like the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant on a train platform.

I'm here to investigate the case involving the shooting of an individual at the Fruit Bill Bard station. Which started a movement. It's like everybody turned against us because of what went down. It's us or them. Still had an untold story buried in those files. They knew this all the time. If they knew this for the past 11 years, then all the other details of what we don't know, that they're hoping has been thrown away or shredded, they will not tell us unless they're forced to.

But first, we take you inside the investigations into two California Highway Patrol officers. What happens to officers who cross the line and to the victims who try to come forward? And he was like, well, we could go get a room, you know, have dinner or something. He had actually got my phone number from the system and had texted me. Some days, you know, there will be dick pics. You just never know what you're going to get. That's coming up in our next episode. Thank you. Cynthia Batubiza, and Nina Smarling. Kuo Ting Nan is our data reporter. Fact-checking by Barbara Van Workum. Editing by Leela Day and our senior supervising producer, Nicole Beamster-Boer,

with help from Alex Emsley. Josh Newell and Chris Hoff engineered the show. Original music by Ramteen Arobloui, who also composed our theme, and Cameron Fraser. The records highlighted in this podcast were obtained as part of the California Reporting Project, a collaborative effort of 40 newsrooms created after the passage of Senate Bill 1421 to investigate police misconduct and serious use of force. So many people helped us shape this show over the past two years. Nigery Eaton and Julie Kane helped bring the show to NPR's Story Lab.

Jerry Holmes, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Nancy Lopez, Kelly McEvers, Mark Ristich, and Joe Shapiro all gave us their time and their ears. Special thanks to Thomas Peel and Nadine Sabai, who helped report the first story we did on this case for Capitol Public Radio and the San Jose Mercury News. Liana Simstrom and Emily Hamilton are our project managers. Micah Ratner and Rebecca Hopkins are two of our many lawyers. And we could not have made this show without buy-in from the top. Thank you to NPR's Nancy Barnes, Neil Carruth, Anya Grunman, Bob Little, and Steve Nelson, and KQED's Erica Aguilar, Holly Kernan, Ethan Lindsay, and Vinnie Tong.

We'll be back next week. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly.