Finalist: Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, contributors, San Francisco Chronicle, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program

By Katey Rusch and Casey Smith 

THE POLICE OFFICER’S CAREER was in peril. Twenty-five years ago, Hossep “Joe” Ourjanian’s supervisors at the Los Angeles County Office of Public Safety accused him of “flagrant” misconduct. They said he had pretended to attend military training to skip work. They had already decided he should be fired when they learned of another allegation: Ourjanian’s girlfriend said he had grabbed her and pulled her hair while she held their infant son.

But then Los Angeles County did something remarkable: The county agreed to hide evidence that Ourjanian allegedly lied to dodge work in exchange for his promise to go without a fight. Records documenting the county’s finding of misconduct would be removed from his personnel file and their very existence would be kept secret. His firing would be rescinded. If any future employer asked, the county agreed to say only that he had resigned “indicating personal reasons.”

In the years since, Ourjanian has bounced from one policing job to the next. He left one agency soon after a local prosecutor questioned his credibility and ability to testify in court, citing criminal charges he faced of child abuse, perjury and witness tampering. (He was never convicted.) Then, in 2019, the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office near Lake Tahoe accused him of embezzling money, records show.

Once again, history was rewritten for Ourjanian.

Just as Los Angeles County had, Sierra County agreed to seal from view every trace of his alleged wrongdoing. The county promised to never disclose how it had documented in detail the way Ourjanian pilfered agency funds. And just like Los Angeles County, Sierra County would deceive anyone asking for a reference: Rather than disclosing that his superiors had moved to fire him, the county would say he had “voluntarily resigned.”

A year later, Eric Apperson, then the sheriff of Del Norte County on the California-Oregon border, was deciding whether to hire Ourjanian. He was impressed by Ourjanian’s decades of experience and his background in the military, where he served in the Army and National Guard. A reference check with Sierra County turned up no red flags. So he hired him. Only when he was contacted for this story did Apperson learn why Ourjanian had left Sierra County.

“Are you kidding me?” he said in an interview.

Speaking hypothetically, he said, “If you're asking me if an officer got terminated for embezzlement, would that make a difference to me if I was hiring them? Yeah, of course, that would make a difference.”

Ourjanian’s case is just one example within a secret system of legal settlements that has whitewashed the corruption, criminality and other misconduct of law enforcement officers throughout California for decades, an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program found.

At least 163 California police agencies have executed separation agreements concealing misconduct allegations against at least 297 officers and deputies, records obtained by this investigation show. The actual numbers are likely much higher, because one-third of police agencies asked to release the agreements refused, citing privacy laws.

Those whose conduct is hidden by these deals — also known as “clean-record agreements” — include a deputy accused of groping a woman held in a county jail, an officer who investigators determined falsified a report to link a man to a crime, and a deputy who was found to have violated department policy when he fatally shot a teenager as he lay wounded.

More than half of the officers who secured clean-record agreements uncovered by the investigation also received lump-sum payments as part of the deals, totaling $23.7 million. One officer got $3.1 million. At least five officers have secured multiple clean-record agreements.

In many cases, police departments hid alleged misconduct even while maintaining it occurred. In every case where reporters could establish the outcome of a department’s internal investigation through documents or interviews, they found that clean-record agreements were given after police agencies had fired the officer, or had begun the process of doing so, based on what they saw as clear evidence of wrongdoing.

In interviews, police chiefs said they reluctantly approve clean-record agreements because it is expensive and difficult to fire even the worst officers. California public employees have the right to appeal any disciplinary action, including termination. Police officers, however, are entitled to a second appeal, typically through evidentiary hearings in front of an arbitrator or civil service commission.

“It’s just cheaper to settle, even if you’re 100% right,” said Scott Fairfield, the former chief of the Bell Gardens Police Department outside of Los Angeles.

The clean-record agreements obtained by this investigation were in most cases signed between 2012 and 2022, though some were executed as far back as 1995. They often were negotiated by the same attorneys and share identical terms, structures and language, even those that were approved years apart or by agencies at opposite ends of the state.

The central objective is always secrecy. Some police forces bury disciplinary records in confidential folders. Others order their outright destruction. In many cases, the separation agreements themselves are made secret, or they outline financial penalties for anyone who reveals their existence.

Because of the layers of secrecy protecting this system, it is hard to know precisely how many officers have benefited, but those familiar with these settlements say their use is widespread. “It happens in almost every agency, at every level,” said Sid Smith, a former California police chief and one of the state’s leading experts on law enforcement background investigations.

With allegations of their wrongdoing safely hidden, ousted officers often find new jobs in law enforcement and other sensitive positions. Of the 297 officers identified by this investigation, at least 108 subsequently landed jobs at other law enforcement agencies, as security guards or as correctional officers.

Former San Fernando Police Chief Jeff Eley, who documents show was accused by a fellow officer of fixing a traffic ticket for a congressional aide, secured a clean-record agreement in 2013 and now works as a sergeant for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority Police. (Prosecutors declined to file charges against Eley, who did not respond to requests for comment, concluding that the police department’s policy allowed the chief to dismiss traffic citations.)

Troy Oviatt, who was a sergeant in the Fairfield Police Department, entered into a clean-record agreement as the city was moving to fire him for alleged sexual misconduct, interviews show. He now works for the Pinole Police Department. (He did not respond to requests for comment.)

“You’re setting up another agency,” said Kevin Johnson, a retired police captain who handled hiring for the Sacramento Police Department.

Concerns about police impunity — including failures to investigate citizen complaints, conduct unbiased internal investigations and prosecute unjustified shootings — have received much attention from journalists, activists and academics, especially since George Floyd’s murder in 2020. But this investigation is the first to reveal the widespread use of clean-record agreements in California, which does not forbid the practice, and the first to describe how these agreements protect and perpetuate police misconduct.

Ourjanian would not agree to be interviewed, and he declined to answer specific questions sent by email and text, saying the information being sought was “confidential.” But he said via text message that the facts reported in this story are “%99.9 inaccurate” and that “why I leave jobs is my business not yours.”

Kameron Crawford, the Sierra County sheriff’s lieutenant who led the internal investigation that concluded Ourjanian had embezzled anti-crime funds, said in an interview that he had recommended the department take the case to the district attorney for a charging decision. But to Crawford’s dismay, talk of prosecution disappeared once the county executed a clean-record agreement and buried all trace of Ourjanian’s alleged thievery.

He said the fear of being sued drove the county’s decision to give Ourjanian a clean-record agreement. “They said, ‘We don’t care where you go, as long as you’re not our problem,’” Crawford recalled.

Clean-record agreements are also undermining recent police reforms, including landmark legislation giving state regulators the power to permanently ban problem officers from police work. Crawford considered reporting Ourjanian to regulators under the new law, Senate Bill 2, which took effect last year. “This is exactly why they’re putting this law in place,” he said, “because of the Joe Ourjanians of the world.”

Instead, Crawford kept quiet; he worried that if he spoke to regulators, he might be violating the secrecy terms in Ourjanian’s clean-record agreement.

Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher, who said he signed the agreement when he was “new and naive,” regrets making a deal with Ourjanian. “In retrospect, now, five years in, there’s no way that I would sign any kind of agreement,” Fisher said. “I think the whole thing is disturbing.”

Fisher believes Ourjanian may sue him and his department for speaking publicly. But he said he’s ready to deal with the consequences.

“Why are we hiding behind this agreement to protect somebody who has gone out and done wrong things?” Fisher asked. “At what point do we have a moral and ethical obligation — regardless of being sued or not — to stand up and say enough is enough?”

REPORTERS ASKED 501 police and sheriff’s departments in California to produce copies of every clean-record agreement they’d executed since 2010. These requests, made under the California Public Records Act, went to police agencies for cities, counties, schools and transit agencies.

One-third of the agencies refused, saying such agreements are exempt from public records laws. Most asserted that the separation deals are police personnel records made confidential by California law, a position refuted by First Amendment lawyers and even some city attorneys.

The Central Marin Police Authority, covering Larkspur, Corte Madera and San Anselmo, refused “to expend staff time and resources searching for documents which clearly cannot be disclosed.” Escondido, near San Diego, said the agreements are so secret that even searching for them within their files would violate their terms.

Others refused to hand over anything without first giving officers a chance to seek a court order preventing any release, a practice that is recommended by state law. The state’s largest law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, has an entire division dedicated to helping draft these agreements but refused to say how many it had signed. Some agencies that released records blacked out every name and date, and sometimes whole pages or passages, making the agreements all but incomprehensible.

“I would be shocked if any public agency turned that over to you,” said Jeffrey Thompson, an attorney who has crafted dozens of clean-record agreements on behalf of cities.

But ultimately, after a three-year fight for records that included dozens of appeals and multiple threats of litigation, reporters aided by the Press Freedom Project, a UC Irvine Law School clinic run by media lawyer Susan Seager, obtained clean-record agreements from 163 of the 501 agencies. With few exceptions, the hundreds of agreements these agencies produced have never before been seen by the public.

These agreements showed a clear pattern: Law enforcement agencies in California are routinely rewriting or erasing serious misconduct by officers they want to quickly and quietly oust.

They do this in many ways, the records show. To start with, nearly all clean-record agreements obscure the official circumstances of an officer’s departure. Often, terminations are transformed into resignations.

The agreements also undo the work of internal affairs investigators. The key question in such investigations is whether a preponderance of evidence shows an officer committed misconduct. If so, the misconduct is “sustained.” Department leaders then determine the appropriate discipline, which can include termination in the most serious cases.

In more than a dozen cases, clean-record agreements rescinded sustained findings of misconduct.

Take the case of Johnathan Hare, an officer in the Sierra Madre Police Department in Los Angeles County. Internal investigators sustained four acts of misconduct by Hare, who confessed to lying to a prosecutor when he denied a past sexual relationship with a woman he arrested for drunken driving. Yet in exchange for his resignation, Hare’s clean-record agreement reversed all four sustained findings, along with his chief’s determination that he should be demoted. (Hare did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

More often, though, clean-record agreements are timed to prevent internal investigations from ever reaching a formal finding of sustained misconduct. In case after case, records and interviews show, internal investigators were accumulating evidence of wrongdoing when a clean-record agreement — sometimes initiated by an officer’s attorney, sometimes by a department’s attorney — abruptly ended the investigations.

Michael Graham, a former chief of a school district police force outside San Bernardino, recalled with fury how a clean-record agreement short-circuited an internal affairs investigation into one of his veteran officers. The officer, Bill Holland, was accused of destroying evidence documenting a 14-year-old boy’s allegation that he had been sodomized during a football hazing ritual, records show. Holland, a former high school football coach, was acquainted with the alleged assailants.

Holland’s agreement — which Graham said he reluctantly approved to guarantee the officer’s departure — halted the internal affairs investigation. “Kind of sticks in your craw,” Graham, now retired, said in an interview.

While Holland did not respond to requests for comment, Graham said in a court deposition that Holland told him he did not book the documents from the investigation into evidence, allowing them to be destroyed, because it was a “go nowhere case.”

Holland’s alleged misconduct occurred while he was on the City Council in Hesperia, and he served two additional terms without voters knowing what he’d done in the hazing case.

Clean-record agreements also help officers evade landmark laws that California passed in recent years in an effort to bring transparency to police discipline. Starting Jan. 1, 2019, SB1421 gave journalists and members of the public access to many internal affairs files so long as there was a sustained finding of misconduct involving sexual assault or dishonesty.

Eighteen days later, Kathryn Hamel signed a clean-record agreement with the Fullerton Police Department in Orange County. Her agreement, records show, specified that “any and all records” describing how she was in the process of being disciplined for sustained findings of dishonesty were “not subject to release under Senate Bill 1421.” The deal required the city to fight any request for those records “to the fullest extent.” (Hamel did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Some clean-record agreements explicitly prevent police chiefs from seeking prosecution of officers for criminal conduct revealed by internal investigations. An agreement in 2013 required the Fremont Police Department “to take no steps to pursue claims of criminal misconduct.”

The most pervasive impact of clean-record agreements, however, is on the background checks that are required for every policing job in California. By law, background investigators must review every applicant’s personnel files at previous departments. Clean-record agreements, though, effectively sanitize these files.

One example: In 2005, the Beaumont Police Department in Riverside County signed a clean-record agreement promising to “expunge” records showing that a supervisor had determined Officer Raymond Arretche improperly used his baton. Arretche’s clean-record agreement stated: “It will be as if the internal investigation never occurred.”

Sure enough, when Arretche later applied to the Riverside Police Department, its background investigator found no trace of his disciplinary record at Beaumont, Riverside’s then-police chief said in an interview. Documents show Arretche was hired and worked nearly four years in Riverside before the department fired him after concluding he had used racial epithets and discussed running over Black people with his patrol car.

In 2021, Arretche, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, secured a second clean-record agreement from the Riverside force that made confidential all records of his alleged racist conduct and transformed his firing into a resignation. A Riverside Police Department spokesperson, Ryan Railsback, said the agreement was “not anything unusual,” explaining that the department was “very comfortable with the outcome” because Arretche was no longer an employee.

When police departments opt to obey state law and provide background investigators with records that have been kept hidden by clean-record agreements, they do so at their own peril. Several have been sued by officers for not honoring the provisions of the deals. One of those suits was filed by Ourjanian.

His clean-record agreement with the Los Angeles County Office of Public Safety — later folded into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department — was supposed to conceal a slew of sustained misconduct findings. But four months after he signed it, he discovered that the records of those findings were still in his personnel file, directly accessible to prospective employers.

After he sued, the agency agreed to remove the records from his personnel file, a county attorney said in an interview. Months later, Ourjanian was working 600 miles north at the Weed Police Department in Siskiyou County.

IN 2016, ALEX DIAZ, chief of the Banning Police Department in Riverside County, wanted Cpl. Steve Hobb out of law enforcement. He fired Hobb for what he described in documents as “anger that cannot be condoned in a police officer.” A series of internal investigations at Banning found that Hobb had committed eight different acts of misconduct, including pushing a fellow officer after a police union meeting and threatening to beat a father with his baton while overseeing a court-ordered visitation.

Yet every finding by investigators was made secret by a clean-record agreement Hobb secured in exchange for agreeing to stop contesting his termination. The department allowed him to resign and paid him $365,000. Diaz was explicitly prohibited from telling the truth about him.

So when the Clearlake Police Department in Lake County called and asked about Hobb, Diaz said in an interview, he had no choice but to lie to the background investigator. He said Hobb was “a fine employee,” and Hobb was soon employed by Clearlake. As Diaz put it: “Bottom line, got rid of a problem. Unfortunately, that problem went somewhere else.”

Hobb, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, is one of at least 52 officers who have benefited from clean-record agreements in getting new jobs in law enforcement, most in the past decade, records and interviews show. Many have been accused of misconduct in their new jobs.

While there’s no indication Hobb has been disciplined in Clearlake, two people he arrested in 2018 for resisting were cleared of charges. Both were represented by a defense attorney who said Hobb had roughed up her clients while they were unarmed and compliant, citing body-camera footage.

One of those clients, Camile Upchurch, said in an interview that Hobb reacted violently when she demanded to know why she and her boyfriend were being detained. Her boyfriend had gotten into an argument with employees at a McDonald’s. “I was screaming, but he didn’t stop,” she said. “He kneed me in the ribs and bashed my head against his patrol car. I was in so much pain.”

Raymond Hendry, whose clean-record agreement with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office reversed his 2019 firing for lying, went on to work for the nearby Willits Police Department, which fired him in 2022 for alleged sexual harassment. The FBI is currently investigating accusations that he sexually assaulted women he met while working at both agencies, according to the former Willits police chief, and his peace officer license has been temporarily suspended. Hendry declined to comment other than saying all the allegations were “lies.”

Reuben Ortiz, who left the Beaumont Police Department after being disciplined over the arrest of a man who was treated for a sprained wrist, was fired from his next job at the McFarland Police Department in Kern County. This time, internal affairs investigators said he shouldn’t have used a Taser to shock a man handcuffed to a hospital bed. In both cases, he was allowed to resign through clean-record agreements. Ortiz, now the chief of a tribal police department in Nevada, said he could not comment because he would be violating multiple nondisclosure agreements. “I’m not going to get sued over your article,” he said.

In interviews, police chiefs expressed dismay when told that officers they hired had been able to conceal their alleged misconduct at other departments with secret clean-record agreements. “You always want to feel like you weren’t duped, right?” said Scott Fairfield, the former Bell Gardens chief.

Fairfield hired Frank Huizar in 2019 without knowing everything about how he had been fired from the California City Police Department in the Mojave Desert for allegedly shoving a 64-year-old City Council member and then lying about it. A special provision in Huizar’s clean-record agreement — one that showed up in dozens of other clean-record agreements — led Fairfield to believe Huizar had performed well in his prior job.

The provision granted Huizar a permit to carry a concealed weapon anywhere in the United States. By law, such permits are only given to officers who resign or retire in good standing. The findings of misconduct against Huizar should have prevented him from getting such a permit. But when Huizar said he had this highly coveted permit that signifies exemplary service, Fairfield assumed the officer had left California City on good terms.

“Did this work for Frank? I think it did,” Fairfield said of the clean-record agreement extended to Huizar, who has not had any disciplinary issues in Bell Gardens and who did not respond to repeated requests for comment. “Did this work for that city? I think it did. The question is: Is it going to work for my city? Am I the one that pays the price for all this?”

In addition to prolonging some officers’ law enforcement careers, clean-record agreements have helped officers secure other sensitive jobs. At least 16 officers identified in this investigation became teachers, including an officer accused of taking out his gun and cursing at an unarmed woman who confronted him outside a courthouse over the arrest of a relative. He now teaches fifth grade in a nearby town.

Another officer, whose department sought to fire him after a string of internal affairs investigations, now teaches at a law enforcement training academy. Another, accused by his Bay Area police force of groping women, was hired as a high school baseball coach. A sheriff’s deputy, fired for lying, went on to testify as an expert witness in drunken driving cases, and recently became an attorney for a firm that regularly negotiates clean-record agreements. Three were elected or appointed to public offices, including mayor and police commissioner.

In 2016, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln hired Jeffrey Lamoureaux as a Title IX investigator, a job that made him responsible for protecting students from sexual harassment and sexual assault. A month earlier, Lamoureaux had secured a clean-record agreement with the Burbank Police Department to conceal how the agency north of Los Angeles forced him out over accusations of sexual harassment.

Burbank’s internal investigators determined that Lamoureaux, a sergeant, repeatedly pressured women to have sex in a tacit exchange for not arresting or citing them. “He doesn’t know … the word no,” one woman told investigators. Lamoureaux admitted in an interview that he “screwed up” by having “extramarital affairs” while at Burbank but denied engaging in a quid pro quo with any of the women.

Lamoureaux disclosed none of this in his application to the university. He wrote that he left the Burbank Police Department to “relocate family.” Contacted for this story, Lamoureaux defended the deception: “I’m like, ‘OK, am I even going to get a chance to work somewhere?’ … I wasn’t really thinking about, ‘Hey, is this dishonest?’”

Over the last eight years, Lamoureaux has held Title IX positions with at least six universities, where he has repeatedly faced complaints from students.

He acknowledged he was forced to resign from Eastern Washington University near Spokane after students said they felt unsafe talking with him and accused him of using racial slurs. A spokesperson for Eastern Washington said the university would not have hired Lamoureaux if its background check had revealed his alleged misconduct in Burbank.

Later, records show, Appalachian State University in North Carolina fired him after he came clean about his disciplinary record in Burbank, an action he took in 2022 after learning of this investigation. Since then, he’s held three more Title IX positions — at Goodwin University in Connecticut, Auburn University in Alabama and the University of San Francisco, where he was the school’s interim Title IX coordinator.

Lamoureux denied he had done anything wrong since leaving Burbank: “I have been consistently professional (and) ethical and followed, not only just university process and protocols, but led by example.”

BROADLY SPEAKING, law enforcement leaders and legislators around the country have given little scrutiny to clean-record agreements. However, there have been isolated efforts — undertaken quietly, and with almost no public notice or media coverage — to rid the industry of the practice, this investigation found.

In 2007, Alaska banned police forces from agreeing to hide officers’ misconduct from the state’s police oversight agency. A decade later, Colorado legislators, responding to urging from police chiefs and sheriffs who had repeatedly and unknowingly hired problem officers with secret deals, passed a law that invalidated any promises of confidentiality made by agreements executed after 2017. Inspired by Colorado, Kansas passed a nearly identical law in 2018.

“We were all frustrated with things we were seeing as we conducted backgrounds,” said Ed Klumpp, a retired police chief turned lobbyist who proposed the Kansas law.

Yet in California, laws that directly target these agreements have never been proposed. And though a few recent laws and court rulings have the potential to diminish the power of clean-record agreements to hide police officers’ misconduct, each one has significant flaws or limitations.

In 2020, for example, a Contra Costa County judge ruled that police internal affairs files must be disclosed to the public even if a negotiated settlement eliminates a sustained finding of misconduct. But that ruling applies only to Contra Costa County, and only to some types of misconduct.

In 2022, a new law, SB16, mandated that departments release misconduct records to members of the public who ask for them, even if an officer resigns before an investigation is complete. The intent was to close a loophole that allowed officers to keep their conduct secret as long as they left before investigators made a finding. However, this law applies only to some categories of misconduct.

Perhaps the most consequential law took effect last year. SB2 requires law enforcement agencies to complete all investigations into “serious misconduct” and report those allegations to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST. The bill empowers POST to ban problem officers from police work.

But the law leaves it to each agency to decide what constitutes “serious” misconduct, and there is no enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance. As of January, nearly half of the police agencies in California had not submitted any records of serious misconduct to POST. Seeking to confirm compliance, POST sent a letter to these agencies — which most of them did not acknowledge receiving.

Another challenge to clean-record agreements is a law enacted six years ago requiring anyone applying for a police job to sign a waiver giving background investigators complete access to their personnel file, even those parts deemed confidential. But records and interviews show that some agencies don’t use the waivers, and others refuse to honor them, still keeping files secret. “Some of them told you to go pound salt,” Sid Smith, the expert on police background investigations, said.

Smith is one of three main authors of the POST background investigation manual used in the hiring of police officers across the state. He said POST has known for decades about the widespread use of clean-record agreements, and that he and other veteran background investigators have repeatedly urged the state agency’s leaders — without success — to include a section in the manual warning agencies about how the agreements can undermine hiring.

“There are a lot of people who get very uncomfortable with background investigators asking certain questions,” he said. “They would just as soon not open Pandora’s box.”

Today, the manual does not include a single word about the secret deals.

POST officials declined to be interviewed, with a spokesperson saying the agency “does not do on-the-record interviews.” The spokesperson emailed a statement saying that POST does not “restrict an agency’s ability to gather relevant information” and detailing the recommended practices for background investigations. The statement did not address Smith’s claims.

While reforms have failed to curb the use of clean-record agreements, one of the most potent lobbying operations in the state, the Peace Officers Research Association of California, or PORAC, has for years advocated their use. Nearly every clean-record agreement obtained by reporters was the handiwork of a small cadre of attorneys bankrolled by PORAC, which is funded by police unions.

PORAC’s website highlights dozens of examples of how successful these lawyers have been in securing agreements that give officers a “clean slate.” Among the success stories cited is that of Frank Huizar, the California City lieutenant found by an internal affairs investigator to have shoved a City Council member. PORAC boasts that its legal defense fund, which spends about $20 million a year defending officers and deputies, is why Huizar is “currently working as a sworn police officer.” (PORAC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

The prospect of squaring off against well-funded PORAC lawyers is one reason police departments so often seize on clean-record agreements as an expedient, cost-effective way to oust problem officers.

“I wasn’t comfortable with settling, but if we would have gone to court, I would not have been comfortable with spending, say, a million dollars in being right,” said Eugene Stump, one of the California City officials who approved Huizar’s clean-record agreement. “Sometimes it’s not worth it to be right.”

The bargain inherent in clean-record agreements came to haunt Alex Diaz, chief of the Banning Police Department. Over a six-year period, the city gave clean-record agreements to seven officers who had been fired for misconduct after the department found they committed misconduct including insurance fraud and lying.

One of those officers was Steve Hobb, whose agreement had led Diaz to lie about Hobb’s history of sustained misconduct findings. Diaz recalls the day an insurance lawyer notified city leaders that Hobb would be given a clean-record agreement with or without the city’s approval. Diaz was stunned to learn that the decision had been taken out of his hands. But as with many municipal insurance contracts, Banning’s policy gave final settlement authority to the insurance carrier.

“I was so disillusioned and so heartbroken,” Diaz said, “that it was like: I can’t do this anymore. How do I protect my citizens? How do I protect the city?”

Four months after Hobb’s clean-record agreement, Diaz resigned and walked away from his 18-year career in law enforcement.

Hossep “Joe” Ourjanian remains in law enforcement. But he’s in trouble again.

Though he initially rose to the rank of captain at the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office, where he was hired in 2020, he suddenly retired last fall, according to current Sheriff Garrett Scott. At the time, the office was investigating whether Ourjanian lied during his background investigation, including by omitting past findings of misconduct. That investigation remains active, and Scott said he will forward its results to the state for possible license revocation and to the local district attorney for potential criminal charges.

At least for the time being, Ourjanian has found a new law enforcement job. He is a police officer for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Reno. But according to the VA, Ourjanian is under investigation.

After it was contacted for this story, the agency suspended him from police duties, a spokesperson said, “upon the discovery of new, previously sealed information about allegations of wrongdoing.”

This article was reported with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Credits

Reporting by Katey Rusch/Investigative Reporting Program and Casey Smith/Investigative Reporting Program. Editing by David Barstow/Investigative Reporting Program and Demian Bulwa. Copy editing by Shoka and Chris Crescibene. Visuals by Chris Kaufman and Laura McDermott. Visuals editing by Ramin Rahimian and Nicole Frugé. Data editing by Dan Kopf. Illustrations by John Blanchard. Collages by Sophie D'Amato. Graphics, design and development by Jenny Kwon. Graphics, design and development editing by Erin Caughey, Alex K. Fong and Alex Tatusian.

By Katey Rusch

For decades, California police chiefs and sheriffs have lamented how difficult it is to fire officers and deputies who act with dishonesty or brutality, blaming powerful labor unions and robust employment protections.

What law enforcement leaders have not revealed, and what has remained a secret until now, is how they have repeatedly turned to an under-the-radar method of getting rid of problem officers — one that not only allows the officers to avoid accountability but, often, to quietly move on to other jobs where they are asked to protect the public.

For years, dozens of California police agencies have executed “clean-record agreements,” clandestine legal settlements that promise to hide the wrongdoing of an officer in exchange for the officer’s guarantee to leave an agency without a fight, an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program found.

Over the past three years, reporters obtained records of these deals — which often reverse an officer’s firing and sometimes include a cash payment — by filing California Public Records Act requests to 501 police agencies. Even though more than one-third of the departments refused to release some or all the agreements they’d signed, reporters were able to expose the widespread use of clean-record agreements in departments up and down the state.

Here are the main takeaways from the investigation:

In the past decade, at least 163 California police agencies have executed clean-record agreements concealing misconduct allegations against 297 officers and deputies. While the precise terms of the agreements varied, most promised to either destroy disciplinary records, hide them in confidential folders or change them to reflect an alternate outcome. In many cases, the deals ensured that only certain information would be released to a potential future employer. At least five officers secured clean-record agreements from multiple agencies.

Of the 297 officers and deputies identified by this investigation, 52 were subsequently hired by another law enforcement agency, 56 were hired as security guards or landed jobs as correctional officers. Meanwhile, 16 officers whose alleged misconduct prompted a clean-record agreement ended up in teaching positions. Three were either elected or appointed to public office. 

The confidential agreements often shared identical structures and language, despite being approved years apart by agencies at opposite ends of the state. Nearly every clean-record agreement obtained by reporters was the handiwork of a small cadre of attorneys bankrolled by the Peace Officers Research Association of California Legal Defense Fund, which is funded by police unions.

In an era of police reform, California has not proposed any legislation targeted at specifically addressing these secret deals. Three states — Colorado, Kansas and Alaska — have quietly passed laws to neutralize the practice. But California has failed to take even basic steps to crack down: In 2022, for example, the state began mandating that police chiefs and sheriffs report serious misconduct by officers to a new agency that can strip them of their licenses. But the landmark law contains no enforcement mechanism to ensure local departments do not agree to bury misconduct.

More than half of the officers who secured clean-record agreements also received lump-sum payments as part of the deals. Payments identified in this investigation totaled $23.7 million, ranging in individual cases from as low as $880 to as high as $3.1 million.

By Katey Rusch

IN 2016, INTERNAL AFFAIRS INVESTIGATORS at the Ventura Police Department concluded that a newly promoted corporal, Josh Young, had lied in a police report. The department demoted Young, who denied wrongdoing, and informed him that dishonesty was a fireable offense.

But before the department could hand down additional discipline, Young went out on paid injury leave. He claimed his demotion was the latest incident in a campaign of religious harassment and that the punishment left him too traumatized to work. Though Ventura argued there was no evidence of an injury, the disciplinary process was paralyzed.

In the end, Ventura was caught between its determination to get rid of Young and the daunting legal obstacles to firing any officer. So it made an extraordinary offer — one that California police departments have extended to hundreds of other officers through a secret system of separation deals known as clean-record agreements.

To secure Young’s retirement, Ventura not only agreed to hide every trace of his alleged misconduct, but to go along with what it viewed as a bogus injury claim. The agency formally certified that Young, then 35, was too disabled to work as a police officer, making him eligible to collect a disability pension from the state of California.

Five years later, Young continues to claim he is too disabled for police work, and according to the most recent state records, from June 2023, still collects an annual $64,000 disability pension.

Yet he is also earning at least $195,000 a year working as a deputy commissioner in New York City’s corrections system. His job: to reform the city’s jail complex, including Rikers Island on the East River, an institution that has been plagued by, among other issues, correctional officers falsifying reports and abusing sick leave.

Neither Young nor Ventura officials would comment about Young’s case, the details of which come from an array of public documents as well as interviews with five people — the former president of Ventura’s police union and four sources with direct knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity in accordance with Chronicle policies.

Under California law, police agencies are forbidden from dangling disability pensions as an inducement to rid themselves of problem officers. And judges have repeatedly ruled that officers who claim injuries after they commit wrongdoing are not eligible to collect these pensions. “The pension roll is a roll of honor — a reward of merit, not a refuge from disgrace,’’ a judge wrote in a 1998 opinion that bars public employers statewide from approving disability pensions for employees fired for misconduct.

But an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program identified 49 officers across the state who, on the verge of being ousted for alleged misconduct, were allowed to walk away with their wrongdoing hidden and collect lifetime disability pensions for injuries their own employers had challenged as unsubstantiated.

Five of these officers later returned to law enforcement — while still collecting disability pensions — and 13 more went on to get security jobs.

Most of the clean-record agreements that made this possible occurred between 2013 and 2018, and were obtained through the California Public Records Act. In all, records show, these 49 officers have collected at least $23.9 million in disability pensions, most of it tax-free.

Attorneys who handle police misconduct cases say the actual number of officers collecting disability pensions guaranteed by these agreements is almost certainly far higher. A full accounting is impossible because public pension funds refuse to identify recipients of disability payments, while at least one-third of police agencies — also citing state secrecy laws — would not turn over all of their clean-record agreements to reporters.

Dave Thomas, a leading California attorney on police disability law, said some departments have given away disability pensions “like Halloween candy’’ to disgraced officers. Indeed, a 2017 state survey found that one in four police departments in California had approved disability pensions for officers facing misconduct charges.

Police departments — and the municipal officials above them — have a financial motive to offer disability pensions to officers they want to fire. The vast majority of these pensions are paid not by the departments but by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, which is financed by contributions from officers and taxpayer-funded public agencies statewide. Departments can reap huge savings in litigation costs if a disability pension encourages a troublesome officer to go without a fight.

The financial stakes are significant: In the fiscal year ending in June 2023, CalPERS paid $2.49 billion in disability pensions to nearly 38,000 police officers, firefighters and other emergency personnel.

And yet CalPERS has done little to investigate potential abuses of the disability pension system, despite knowing of the practice for more than a decade, records and interviews show. Indeed, there is no evidence CalPERS was aware of the vast majority of the 49 officers identified in this investigation as having collected disability pensions after securing clean-record agreements.

“We can’t review every certification that comes in,” Matt Jacobs, the general counsel for CalPERS, said in an interview.

At the root of this failure are the agreements themselves. In total, this investigation identified 297 officers who secured clean-record agreements, most in the past decade. All of the secret deals guaranteed departments would hide evidence that the officers had been accused of misconduct. But 16% of the clean-record agreements obtained in this investigation created an additional fiction — that the departments believed the ousted officers qualified for a disability pension.

Within this subset of clean-record agreements, a pattern emerged. Repeatedly, police forces did what California law seeks to forbid: declaring an officer whose injury claim followed an accusation of misconduct too disabled to work and eligible for a disability pension. In some cases, the parties agreed to not even acknowledge the existence of the agreement. In others, agreements were segregated in locked filing cabinets. But the effect was the same: CalPERS, future employers and the public were all kept in the dark.

CalPERS has, in rare instances, gotten tips that local agencies offered such deals. In one case, an Oakland officer fired for dishonesty signed a clean-record agreement that hid his misconduct and guaranteed a $58,000-a-year disability pension. The retirement system, alerted that the officer went on to work as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, discovered that Oakland had induced the officer to leave by promising the pension. CalPERS revoked the pension, calling the deal an “explicit violation of the law.’’

But while CalPERS has repeatedly argued that the way these agreements dole out pensions constitutes criminal fraud by municipal officials — and has on at least one occasion recommended criminal charges — not a single county or state prosecutor has ever brought a case.

No one was ever supposed to know about the bargain Josh Young struck with Ventura that helped him secure his disability pension.

On a night shift just before Christmas 2015, Young and an officer he was training arrested a man on suspicion of drug use. According to records and interviews, the trainee did a sobriety evaluation in the field, but the department’s standard practice was to have a different officer do a second evaluation at the station. Instead, no second evaluation was done, and the department concluded that Young falsified records to make it appear as though it had. The trainee disclosed the alleged deception to superiors, and investigators quickly confirmed the trainee’s account by looking at video of the arrest.

Even Ventura’s police union president at the time — who confirmed the details of the investigation — was appalled. Cameron Goettsche typically defended his members and considered Young a friend. “Now this field training officer can no longer testify in court because he’s a liar,’’ he said in an interview.

New York City’s Department of Correction declined to comment on what it knew about Young’s past when he was selected for a job so important his hiring was trumpeted in a press release lauding his expertise in “law enforcement best practices.”

Six months after Young’s hiring, New York City began a routine second background investigation. Ventura officials promptly notified Young that New York was asking about his past. In response, records show, Young threatened via email to sue Ventura if it didn’t abide by the terms of their clean-record agreement and conceal that he’d been accused of dishonesty.

He also asked Ventura to misrepresent his past to journalists. When a Ventura official alerted Young about a reporter’s inquiries for this article, emails show, Young demanded the city say that he had retired “without any disciplinary issue or complaints.’’ Ventura assured him it was city policy “to provide limited information about former employees.”

While Ventura officials provided Young’s clean-record agreement under the state public records act, they denied almost every other request related to Young.

YOUNG, who claims to be a descendant of Brigham Young, said fellow Ventura officers subjected him to “pervasive harassment” about his Mormon faith from the day he joined the department in 2005. The harassment was so severe, he asserted, that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

But it wasn’t until he was demoted that Young filed both a workers’ compensation claim for PTSD and a formal discrimination complaint over the religious harassment he says he endured for 11 years, documents and interviews show.

Young’s actions follow a pattern familiar to attorneys involved in police misconduct cases throughout California. Indeed, nearly all 49 of the officers who collected disability pensions after securing clean-record agreements filed claims for workers’ compensation soon after they were accused of misconduct. At least 21 also filed a discrimination claim based on race, religion, sexual orientation or gender.

“These cases seem to follow a playbook,’’ Mark Witzig, a lawyer who has represented hundreds of cities in police injury cases, said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean the officer isn’t injured. It’s just that these cases tend to follow a particular course.”

Filing workers’ compensation and discrimination claims invariably stalls the disciplinary process. Officers claim they are too injured to be interviewed about their misconduct, or they cite the disciplinary action itself as evidence of discrimination.

As soon as Young claimed PTSD, Ventura put his disciplinary case on hold and paused plans to discipline him. Young cited the demotion as further proof he was being harassed for being Mormon, and alleged that the officer overseeing the internal affairs investigation had mocked his faith.

Goettsche, the police union president and a fellow Mormon, said he found Young’s discrimination claim so outrageous that he refused to authorize the union to pay Young’s legal fees. “He knew his career was over,” Goettsche said, “and the easiest way out, to get a check, was to say, ‘Oh, you made fun of me.’”

But the effectiveness of making injury and discrimination claims while facing misconduct charges is undeniable, records and interviews show. Fifteen years before Young left Ventura, Sgt. Shawn Shelton followed the strategy when he was about to be fired from the police force in Manhattan Beach, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles.

Internal affairs investigators concluded he had stolen department funds and had flashed his badge to get out of a shoplifting allegation. In quick succession, Shelton filed for workers’ compensation and sued for discrimination. He asserted he’d been harassed for being gay and that stress-induced hypertension left him unable to work or to answer questions from internal affairs investigators.

As in Young’s case, these measures slowed the disciplinary process to a crawl. After three years of costly litigation, Manhattan Beach concluded in 2005 that the best way to part ways with Shelton was to give him a disability pension and a onetime payment of $36,500, while promising to purge all records of his misconduct, records show. (City officials did not return repeated requests for comment.) As an inducement, it offered one more perk in his clean-record agreement — a so-called retirement badge, a police shield stamped with the word “retired.”

Weeks after Shelton’s agreement was finalized, a movie production company in Louisiana hired him as a security guard. He didn’t last long in the job. Soon after, he was indicted for drugging and killing a 19-year-old aspiring police officer, who was found half-naked and dead of an overdose in Shelton’s apartment.

Before he was arrested, though, Shelton used a Manhattan Beach Police Department badge — presumably the retirement badge — to lure a 14-year-old into his Hummer and force the boy to perform oral sex.

Shelton is now serving time for both crimes in a Louisiana prison, where he did not respond to requests for comment. He continues to collect a disability pension from California taxpayers: $60,000 a year, tax-free.

FROM THE START, senior members of the Ventura Police Department suspected Josh Young was faking PTSD. Just a few years earlier, another Ventura officer had claimed injuries while being investigated for misconduct, records show. While Young said in his discrimination claim that he’d been diagnosed with PTSD, the city said there was “no medical evidence’’ of the disorder and quickly denied Young’s workers’ compensation claim.

Ventura’s denial was atypical. Given the inherent dangers of policing, California departments normally don’t contest injury claims. But the cases of the 49 officers examined here showed a starkly different modus operandi: In nearly every single case, their departments rejected injury claims they filed after being accused of misconduct.

Time and again, the departments argued in their legal filings that the claimed injuries were conveniently timed fictions.

In Los Angeles County, for example, the El Monte Police Department accused Officer Michael Providente of falsely claiming he could no longer work due to a back injury after he learned he was going to be fired. The agency had accused him of exposing himself in public, taking photos of his genitals on his department cellphone, and repeatedly ignoring radio calls because he was sleeping on duty.

In court papers, El Monte alleged that Providente hoped the injury claim would “offer him some negotiating leverage” as he tried to reverse his firing.

The ensuing fight lasted two years, offering a window into a complex police disciplinary process that agencies often seek to avoid — in part because they risk losing. One hearing lasted 25 days.

Providente filed a pair of workers’ compensation claims, accused the city of wrongfully firing him in a federal lawsuit (which survived after he partially defeated a motion to dismiss), and exercised his right to appeal through arbitration. When the arbitrator found that Providente had committed misconduct but should not have been fired, El Monte rejected the ruling and upheld his firing. So Providente sued again.

In the end, El Monte, whose current city manager did not respond to requests for comment, signed a clean-record agreement that settled all legal claims and concealed the misconduct allegations against Providente. Further, the city promised to tell CalPERS that the very injuries it had long challenged now qualified him for a lifetime disability pension.

In a telephone interview, Providente called most of the allegations “totally trumped up’’ but admitted he fell asleep on duty. “Yes, I nodded off. We all do that,’’ he said. Providente, who has collected more than $900,000 from his disability pension, said he was still too incapacitated to do police work, but volunteered that he went on to provide private security to celebrities, a job he said was less strenuous. He also said he was well enough to run in 120-mile relay races for El Monte’s police union after his departure.

Capitulations similar to El Monte’s happened often in the 49 cases identified in this investigation, records show. Despite arguing against an injury claim for months or even years, each department eventually did a complete reversal and agreed to tell CalPERS that the injuries were, in fact, genuine. In Young’s case, the Ventura Police Department did so even though it made a point of documenting in writing that it continued to dispute his PTSD claim.

An even more striking flip-flop took place when an officer at the Desert Hot Springs Police Department in Riverside County was about to be disciplined. Paul Tapia was accused of misconduct over allegations he made about a female colleague.

But in the middle of a pre-disciplinary hearing, Tapia said he was experiencing chest pains and needed an ambulance. The next day, he filed an injury claim with the city saying he could no longer work because of a cardiac condition, though the city would later learn, through medical records, that Tapia’s doctors had determined his heart was healthy.

Tapia then claimed that a slew of old injuries, including an ankle sprain and irritable bowel syndrome, were work-related and had left him permanently disabled. Once again, the city obtained medical records showing, in its view, that he was not permanently disabled. One doctor wrote that Tapia was not “totally disabled at any time.’’

Yet even after amassing this evidence, Desert Hot Springs signed a secret clean-record agreement in which it promised to certify to CalPERS that Tapia was “disabled and unable to perform the duties of a police officer.”

Without this cooperation from police agencies, officers would not be able to secure disability pensions from CalPERS. State law requires municipalities to certify to CalPERS that an officer is incapacitated because of a work injury. Within these 49 cases, the city officials who signed the certifications were often the very same officials who, weeks before, had been challenging the officer’s injury.

“If we can get them a disability pension, that saves us money,’’ said Rick Daniels, who was the city manager of Desert Hot Springs when Tapia’s case was resolved in 2013. “The standard practice was avoiding the cost of litigation.”

Tapia declined interview requests, citing the confidentiality promises in his clean-record agreement, but said in an email that he had never committed misconduct. He said each allegation about his conduct and his injury claim was “completely false.”

Tapia, who until recently was an investigator for the Public Defender’s Office in Spokane, Wash., has collected more than $625,000 in disability payments from CalPERS since 2013 — or about $60,000 a year, all of it tax-free.

In addition to disability pensions, officers often received lump-sum payments as additional incentives to move on. Josh Young received $300,000 on top of his disability pension. Jonathan Bellusa, who agreed to resign from the now-disbanded Oakland Unified School District Police Department after he was accused of falsifying time sheets and sexually harassing a co-worker, received $550,000 on top of his $44,000-a-year disability pension. (The school district declined to comment, and Bellusa did not return repeated requests for comment.)

In all, 159 of the 297 officers whose clean-record agreements were obtained in this investigation received $23.7 million in lump-sum payments as part of their clean-record agreements. Thirty of those 159 officers also received disability pensions.

CALPERS has broad authority to prevent police officers from illegally collecting disability pensions. The agency, which employs 2,800 people, can question city managers and police chiefs or subpoena medical and internal affairs records to find out whether a disability pension is legitimate.

In Young’s case, CalPERS might have learned that his superiors wanted to discipline him, that Ventura argued his injury claim was bogus, and that a clean-record agreement had been executed guaranteeing the investigation into his conduct would not tarnish his personnel file.

But there’s no indication that a CalPERS investigation was done, records and interviews show. Nor is there evidence that CalPERS asked a single question of any agency before approving the 49 disability pensions for officers with clean-record agreements documented in this investigation.

CalPERS officials declined to speak about any of these 49 cases, citing privacy laws. But in a series of interviews, top officials, including Jacobs, the agency’s general counsel, said CalPERS typically doesn’t question disability pension applications for police officers because they assume police departments are acting in good faith.

“They just tell us that this person is disabled, and we pretty much accept that,” Jacobs said. “We presume the agency is being truthful.”

CalPERS’ actions, however, suggest officials have grown increasingly alarmed about the prevalence of fraudulent disability claims from police officers.

One turning point came in 2017 when CalPERS examined 60 police departments to learn how they were awarding disability pensions. It found that a quarter of the departments that cooperated with the review had given disability pensions to officers facing discipline for misconduct.

That same year, CalPERS began instructing police departments to send “all relevant personnel documents’’ whenever an officer requested a disability pension. CalPERS insists it will not pay a pension if it believes an agency is withholding records, but admits it is an honor system. “We don’t know what we’ve gotten” in terms of personnel records, Jacobs said, “and what we haven’t got.”

Also in 2017, CalPERS told departments to “certify’’ that every requested disability pension wasn’t simply a means to oust a troublesome officer. CalPERS says it will not approve a disability retirement application without this certification, though records show this mandate is not always enforced.

In late 2019, CalPERS began demanding that departments explicitly disclose in writing if officers they were putting forward for disability pensions had faced disciplinary action. If the retirement system detects an inconsistency on this form, officials said, CalPERS will follow up with the local agency before approving a pension — but, again, it admits its ability to do that is dependent on the information provided by the agency.

Last year, CalPERS sought to shore up pensions again. It mandated that agencies fill out new forms to prove an officer’s medical incapacitation. So far, it’s unclear what impact this latest change has had.

“We’ve taken, I think, great strides in trying to tighten up the system,” Jacobs said. “Our hope is that that’s had some effect.”

Yet CalPERS admits it does not dedicate any resources to uncovering possible illegal pensions it continues to pay out, insisting it is “not an enforcement agency.” Instead, it relies primarily on tips from the public.

It discovered at least one concerning case in its 2017 audit. William Bailey, a sergeant in the San Fernando Police Department north of Los Angeles, had been fired over allegations that he lied to get a promotion. In the course of investigating how Bailey ended up with a disability pension despite this record, CalPERS discovered Bailey’s clean-record agreement. The secret deal hid Bailey’s alleged dishonesty and explicitly laid out how, in exchange for Bailey dropping his termination appeal and resigning, the city would support his application for a disability pension.

“It seemed to us to be such a clear case of conspiracy, really, between the police officer and the city on a false disability claim,” Jacobs said.

CalPERS officials revoked Bailey’s disability pension and demanded he repay the $230,000 he’d collected.

CalPERS also asked both the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, then led by Jackie Lacey, and the state Attorney General’s Office, then headed by Xavier Becerra, to criminally charge the officials who executed the clean-record agreement. Neither office took action, with a spokesperson for the attorney general citing insufficient evidence. (The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on its decision.)

During his pension revocation hearing, Bailey highlighted what he saw as an imbalance in consequences: He “pays almost a quarter of a million dollars back,” he said, according to a transcript, “and the cities — CalPERS hasn’t done anything with the cities, like, revoke their CalPERS privileges or memberships or anything?”

Bailey declined to comment further to a reporter, saying he feared he’d violate the confidentiality provisions of his agreement. Current San Fernando City Manager Nick Kimball said the city did not intentionally try to deceive CalPERS, but entered into a deal it thought was legal, on advice from counsel.

In 2019, CalPERS came across still more clean-record agreements as it was investigating a tip that the Beverly Hills Police Department had used the promise of disability pensions to rid itself of three officers. Documents show the department was either investigating or seeking to fire the officers for misconduct that included excessive force, dishonesty and sexual harassment. Instead, all three ended up with disability pensions after negotiating clean-record agreements.

Once again, CalPERS revoked the pensions and demanded repayment of $630,000 from the officers. And CalPERS officials again asked Los Angeles County prosecutors and the state attorney general to look into potential criminal charges for those involved in approving the agreements, which they described in legal filings as incontrovertible evidence of “deceit’’ and “fraud.’’ And once again, prosecutors took no action.

Even so, the fallout continues. The three ex-officers are now suing nearly a dozen Beverly Hills city employees for revealing information to CalPERS from agreements they said should have remained confidential. (The officers and the city declined to comment on the lawsuit and the agreements.)

Outside of obtaining prosecutions, CalPERS says it has little recourse against municipal officials found to be abusing the pension system. “There’s not a lot we can do,” Jacobs said. The agency’s only option, he said, is exercising the “death penalty” — kicking an entire city and all its retirees out of the system. But Jacobs said CalPERS would never resort to this option because it would punish public employees who had no involvement in the fraud.

Instead, CalPERS has tried to educate its members through revamped training sessions starting in 2017 and a new guidebook published in 2018.

When asked why the agency has chosen to address abuse of the disability retirement system through training and additional forms, rather than making sure it obtains and examines basic personnel records, like clean-record agreements, CalPERS said it’s simply a matter of resources — though officials acknowledged they have not asked the Legislature to fund additional personnel. “Does the IRS do an investigation of every tax return?” Jacobs asked.

Last winter, reporters sent CalPERS the clean-record agreements of three officers identified in this investigation, including Josh Young. Jacobs refused to say what action, if any, has been taken in Young’s case. The matter is confidential.

Credits

Reporting by Katey Rusch/Investigative Reporting Program and Casey Smith/Investigative Reporting Program. Editing by David Barstow/Investigative Reporting Program and Demian Bulwa. Copy editing by Shoka and Chris Crescibene. Visuals by Chris Kaufman and Laura McDermott. Visuals editing by Ramin Rahimian and Nicole Frugé. Data editing by Dan Kopf. Illustrations by John Blanchard. Collages by Sophie D'Amato. Graphics, design and development by Jenny Kwon. Graphics, design and development editing by Erin Caughey, Alex K. Fong and Alex Tatusian.