Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – DarwinBondGraham, now an editor with Oaklandside, and Ali Wilson, a long-time crime reporter most recently with the East Bay Express, got a long-sought, and frankly well-deserved, legal win against the City of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department. This lawsuit started several years ago, and in 2021, the duo earned a legal victory. Now, on July 2nd, the Oakland City Council is poised to give the team of journalists $200,000, barring any last-minute decisions.
Jacob Simas put it this way for Oaklandside:
Advocates of government transparency and a free press scored a victory on April 2, after a state judge ruled that the Oakland Police Department is required to hand over reports, requested by journalists through the Public Records Act, detailing years of internal investigations of police shootings, use-of-force incidents, and officer misconduct involving dishonesty and sexual assault.
Source: Oaklandside: July 7th 2021.
But some questions are worth raising. First, are BondGraham and Wilson of the level of means to pay for attorneys? That’s relevant because most Oakland residents would not bother to pay a lawyer for such a matter. While it’s important, it’s not a “food-on-the-table” or medical malpractice matter. Second, that money payout happens to come in the middle of a giant $177 million budget deficit. How can the City of Oakland best avoid such situations in the future?
One could say this is an example of the City of Oakland losing money because it failed to respond to a deadline, only this wasn’t regarding a grant. It was because the City of Oakland did what it normally does to residents: ignore a public records request or drag its collective feet in answering one. The difference is that BondGraham and Wilson weren’t going to let that stand and filed a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, July 2nd, the Oakland City Council is expected to approve a resolution to pay the pair of reporters $199,000.
What follows below is what the City of Oakland’s City Attorney Barbara Parker says about the matter in the report to the Oakland City Council:
City Of Oakland Staff Report On Settlement With BondGraham and Wilson
On June 15, 2021 the Council passed Resolution 88700 C.M.S. authorizing and directing the City Attorney to compromise and settle Petitioners’ attorneys’ fees and costs for services provided up to the April 13, 2021 Writ of Mandate for the sum of $125,204.50.
Following the passage of Oakland City Council Resolution 88700 C.M.S., the parties engaged in extensive communications and made several appearances before the court pursuant to the redaction-challenge procedure, and ultimately the City and Police Department agreed to and were ordered to remove certain redactions and were permitted to retain others. On October 18, 2022 the City Council passed Resolution 89447 C.M.S. authorizing and directing the City Attorney to compromise and settle Petitioners’ attorneys’ fees and costs for services provided after the date of the court’s entry of the April 13, 2021 Writ of Mandate and up to October 18, 2022, for the sum of $105,000.00.
The prior settlement preserved Petitioners’ pending appeal, BondGraham v. Superior Court of Alameda, First District Court of Appeal Case No. A165187, where Petitioners appealed certain rulings by the trial court regarding the City’s redactions. On January 3, 2024, the First District Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Petitioners and issued a peremptory writ of mandate which commanded the trial court to conduct additional proceedings.
After extensive communications between the parties, in an effort to comply with the Court of Appeal’s ruling, the City and Police Department have agreed to lift certain redactions and have been permitted to retain others
Because they prevailed on their appeal, Petitioners are entitled to attorneys’ fees and costs for services provided to Petitioners in their pursuit of their appeal. The City and Petitioners have agreed to settle the claim for those attorneys’ fees in the amount of $199,000.00.
The Council authorized settlement of attorneys’ fees and costs in connection with Petitioners’ appeal in closed session on Thursday, June 20, 2024 (moved by President Pro Tempore Dan Kalb and seconded by Councilmember Carroll Fife – 6 Ayes, 2 Excused – Councilmember Kevin Jenkins and Councilmember Janani Ramachandran).
Who Paid For The Lawsuit On Behalf Of Darwin BondGraham and Ali Wilson?
The other question is who paid for the lawsuit, and the answer appears to be the employers of Darwin BondGraham, CitySide / Oaklandside. Its important because the common Oakland resident doesn’t have spare cash laying around to spend on a legal challenge that has nothing to do with food or medicine.
On July 7th, 2021, the Oaklanside ran an article called “A win for local journalism: Judge says Oakland Police Department must comply with Public Records Act”, by Jacob Simas. In it, Simas sat down with BondGraham and wrote:
The ruling was the culmination of a lawsuit filed in August 2020 by two journalists—Ali Winston and The Oaklandside’s news editor, Darwin BondGraham—against the city of Oakland for failing to produce documents in accordance with state and local transparency laws. I sat down with BondGraham to learn more about the genesis of the lawsuit, where it fits into the broader fight for police accountability and transparency, and what the judge’s decision means for journalists in Oakland, and beyond.
Last week’s ruling comes more than two years after you filed Public Records Act requests with the city of Oakland for dozens of previously confidential police files. Take us back to that time. What prompted you to ask for these records?
In response to years of Black Lives Matter protests and pressure put on the state legislature by the families of people killed by police, in 2018 State Senator Nancy Skinner wrote Senate Bill 1421, which required police and sheriff’s departments to make public certain disciplinary records and investigations of police-involved shootings. Gov. Jerry Brown signed this bill into law and on January 1, 2019, it went into effect.
My colleague Ali Winston and I were among the many journalists up and down the state who had been waiting years for this to happen. The new rules meant that, for the first time in many decades, reporters and the public would get to see previously secret records showing how police departments investigate themselves when officers use deadly force, when officers were found to have lied, or engaged in sexual misconduct. All of those internal documents now had to be made public.
So BondGraham filed over 30 public records requests with the City of Oakland, and for the purpose of gaining more information to write a book he and Wilson were working on about The Riders Scandal of 2001, and the Celeste Guap sexual exploitation case (where Zennie62Media’s Zennie62 YouTube channel has the only long-form interview on YouTube with Jasmine Abuslin aka Celeste Guap). That book is out now and called “The Riders Come Out At Night”. Great for the reporting pair, but what about the other East Bay Journalists who filed a separate petition on behalf of ? And what about normal Oaklanders?
According to a Courthouse News article from 2020, attorney Sam Ferguson with the Meade Firm represented East Bay journalists Scott Morris, Sarah Belle Lin, Brian Krans, the watchdog group Oakland Privacy and its research director Michael Katz, and “a proposed class of what could be a thousand people and organizations who have open public records act requests with the department”.
The win by Wilson and BondGraham is great for the declining ranks of journalists, but what about the common person? And were black media organizations part of the petition group that produced the separate legal challenge from Wilson and BondGraham?
The City Of Oakland Must Install A Charter Law That Public Records Requests Must Be Responded To And Within Two Weeks To A Month
The best way to move forward is a law that binds the City of Oakland to act on public records requests as soon as possible. Right now, such a law does not exist. The public does not have the financial backing these journalists enjoyed, and certainly not the black and Latino residents victimized by the Oakland Police Department over the decades.
Indeed, the reporting on the victory is directed toward the mostly white male journalists, and completely forgets the mostly black and Latino members of the population that the Oakland Police Department works with in a screwy relationship based on the bad mix of racism and poverty.
So Darwin and Ali get $200,000, the material to sell a book about how black folks were screwed with by Oakland cops, the other journalists get nothing, and black and Latino victims of OPD are what they’ve always been: pawns.
I invite both Wilson and BondGraham to come on Zennie62 YouTube Live and talk about the win, the settlement, and what it means going forward.