California Supreme Court shoots down police report disclaimers

(CN) — The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that requiring someone seeking to file a police report to first read and sign a disclaimer is unconstitutional.

In an opinion by Justice Joshua Groban, the court found that the law risked creating “a potent disincentive” for citizens to report police misconduct.

“Even well-intentioned prohibitions on knowing falsehoods can trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny if they go too far in chilling protected speech,” Groban wrote in the 6-1 decision.

The ruling represents a reversal for the state’s high court. The 1995 law in question makes it a crime to file a knowingly false claim of misconduct against a peace officer. Before accepting a complaint, law enforcement agencies must require the complainant to read and sign an advisory informing the would-be complainant that knowingly filing a false complaint of police misconduct is a crime. In a 2002 case, the state Supreme Court upheld the law, concluding that the it “fell within various categories of content discrimination” that courts “had recognized as generally permissible,” in Groban’s words.

But federal courts have since rejected that analysis and determined California’s penal code runs afoul of the First Amendment. In the wake of those decisions, the city of Los Angeles stopped forcing people seeking to file complaints of police misconduct to first sign the advisory. In 2017, the LAPD police officers’ union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, sued the city in an effort to bring back the mandatory disclaimers. The city fought the lawsuit, arguing that the advisories were a constitutional regulation of speech. A Superior Court judge sided with the union, ordering the city to go back to forcing complainants to read and sign the advisories.

In taking up the issue, the California Supreme Court had to decide whether or not the statute risks “impermissibly distorting the marketplace of ideas” by “driving certain ideas or viewpoints” from the public sphere. Among the issues with the law was its asymmetry. That is, it criminalized false complaints made against cops, but left unregulated false statements made by witnesses in support of law enforcement.

“While we express no view whether any of these elements might unduly burden speech when considered in isolation, we think it clear that, considered together, they threaten censorship of ideas by deterring citizens from filing truthful (or at least not knowingly false) complaints of police misconduct,” Groban wrote.

One justice, Goodwin Liu, dissented.

“Our men and women in uniform have a hard enough job without having to deal with knowingly false allegations of misconduct,” Liu wrote. “Section 148.6 is no more unconstitutional than laws that make it a crime to commit perjury, file a false police report, submit a false document to a public agency or lie to a government official concerning an official matter.”

He called Groban’s rationale, that the mandatory disclaimer might discourage filing complaints against the police, “speculative.”

“There are many reasons people might be deterred from filing a complaint against the police, but there are no facts showing that section 148.6 is such a reason,” Liu wrote. “This statute has been on the books for three decades. If it were genuinely confusing or suppressive of good-faith complaints, surely there would be some objective indicators to that effect by now.”

In the majority opinion, Groban responded to Liu’s dissent.

“The question we must ask is whether the average person might be deterred from making even a truthful report of wrongdoing (or at least not a knowingly false one) when they are admonished with the threat of criminal prosecution — and required to sign a document attesting to that admonishment — before they are allowed to complain,” Groban wrote. “We believe the answer to that question is clearly yes.”

Matt Nguyen, an attorney who represented civil rights nonprofits during oral arguments, praised the ruling. “It takes tremendous courage for victims and witnesses of police misconduct to come forward and seek justice and accountability. A resounding majority of the California Supreme Court made clear today that speaking truth to power is a fundamental right protected by the First Amendment,” he wrote in an email.

In a written statement, a spokesman for LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said the city would continue to aim for “the right balance to prevent negative consequences of false complaints against police officers while complying with the First Amendment, and not discouraging those with good faith misconduct complaints from coming forward.”

The police union’s attorney did not respond to an email requesting a comment on the ruling.

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