This fall, IPAT Clinic Certified Law Students Shannon Barbour and Juliana Clark presented on their work as members of the UCI Press Freedom Project at Yale Law School’s eighth annual Access and Accountability Conference. Juliana and Shannon participated in a panel discussion exploring how law school clinics have successfully advocated for freedom of the press and government transparency.
The 2025 Access and Accountability Conference
Yale Law School hosts the annual Access and Accountability conference in conjunction with the law school’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression. Yale has hosted the two-day conference since 2018. The mission is to bring together transparency advocates—including professors, journalists, students, attorneys, and government officials—to identify and propose solutions to the lack of government transparency and accountability.
This year, panel discussions centered around safeguarding freedom of the press and evolving threats to democracy, including threats to public record preservation laws and the elimination of government workers who process public records requests. Speakers included former Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, attorney Floyd Abrams, former Yale Dean Harold Hongju Koh, Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez, and UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Urban, among many others.
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor Heidi Kitrosser moderated the “Success Stories” panel. New York University School of Law professor Christopher J. Morten, Harvard Law School clinical instructor Mason Kortz, Cooley associate Hiba Ismail, and New York University law student Eve Zelickson also presented on the “Success Stories” panel alongside Ms. Barbour and Ms. Clark.
California Police Records Access Project
Shannon Barbour, a second-year UCI law student and former journalist, discussed the Press Freedom Project’s work to obtain public records from California law enforcement agencies and place those records on a free public database. The Press Freedom Project conducts this work on behalf of the Investigative Reporting Program, nonprofit newsroom and teaching institute based at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
The Investigative Reporting Program and other contributing journalists have been gathering police records since 2019, and the Press Freedom Project steps in when agencies refuse to produce records, Ms. Barbour explained. To obtain the records, the Press Freedom Project relies on the California Public Records Act and its recent amendments, which were passed in response to George Floyd’s murder and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. The Press Freedom Project most often cites California Penal Code section 832.7(b), which requires public disclosure of records of police shootings, use of force causing death or great bodily injury, certain findings of misconduct, and other records as specified by the statue.
Once the Press Freedom Project obtains these records, they are placed in a public database called The Police Records Access Project. Thanks in large part to former State Senator Nancy Skinner, in 2023 the State of California allocated $6.87 million to fund the website. Amendments to the California Public Records Act (S.B. 1421, approved in 2018, and S.B. 16, approved in 2021) played a key role in making this grant funding available. The purpose of these amendments is to stop government entities from withholding records—and thereby concealing—incidents of police misconduct, use of force, and officer-involved shootings. By making these records more readily accessible to the public, the database furthers the amendments’ purpose of transparency and accountability. “For 40 years, California hid police misconduct,” Sen. Skinner said when the funding was announced. “Now with this new database, Californians will have even better access, making it easier to find out which law enforcement officers have a history of bad behavior and which of our police departments do the right thing to hold their officers accountable.”
The database now contains about 1.5 million pages of public records from about 700 law enforcement agencies and about 12,000 cases. This feat was made possible due to collective efforts from UC Irvine Law’s Press Freedom Project, UC Berkeley Journalism School’s Investigative Reporting Program, Stanford’s Big Local News, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, and many others.
Ms. Barbour provided a real-time demonstration of how to use the database, which can be searched by city, keyword, and/or officer name. UC Berkeley data scientists, many from the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, are using artificial intelligence to categorize and rename records to ensure the database is as accessible as possible.
Defending Journalists’ Civil Rights
Juliana Clark, also a second-year UCI law student and former journalist, discussed recent victories in the cases of City of Los Angeles v. Ben Camacho and Jonathan Peltz v. City of Los Angeles.
In Camacho, the Press Freedom Project represented Ben Camacho, an investigative journalist and photographer reporting on Los Angeles County and Orange County. In 2022, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office released 9,000 photographs of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers to Mr. Camacho to settle a public records lawsuit he had filed. Despite initially telling Mr. Camacho that the disclosed photographs did not contain undercover officers, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office changed its tune under pressure from police labor union leadership and claimed some photographs were of undercover officers.
Sixteen months after it provided the photographs, the city sued Mr. Camacho to try to “claw back” the photos and get them taken off the internet. The trial court ruled against Mr. Camacho, saying the First Amendment bar on prior restraint didn’t apply to his case. The Press Freedom Project appealed the decision and while the appeal was pending, the city reached out and offered to drop its lawsuit against Mr. Camacho, and agreed to pay $300,000 in attorney’s fees to the team of lawyers representing Mr. Camacho and Watch the Watchers, the website that posted the photographs. Today, all 9,000 photographs are available on www.watchthewatchers.net, along with the officers’ disciplinary records.
In Peltz, the Press Freedom Project represented Jonathan Peltz and Kathleen Gallagher, journalists for the independent news organization Knock LA. In that case, the Press Freedom Project and co-counsel Hadsell Stormer Renick & Dai, sued the Los Angeles Police Department for violating Mr. Peltz and Ms. Gallagher’s First and Fourth Amendment rights when officers wrongfully arrested and detained them during their new coverage of protests at Echo Park Lake in 2021. Right before jury selection, the legal team negotiated a settlement of $500,000 in damages and attorney’s fees paid by the City of Los Angeles.
The UCI Press Freedom Project is a program of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. For more information about the Press Freedom Project, contact Professor Susan E. Seager, Tel: (949) 824-4234, sseager1.clinic@law.uci.edu.
Credit: Courtesy of Juliana Clark
