Press Democrat senior editor: It shouldn’t be this hard to get information from Sonoma County’s public servants

This week is Sunshine Week, which was established by news industry leaders 18 years ago to promote open government and call attention to the importance of freedom of information in a healthy democracy.

The timing coincides with the March 16 birthday of our fourth president, James Madison, the chief architect of the First Amendment, which guarantees some of our most precious freedoms: religion, speech and freedom of the press.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both,” Madison wrote. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Madison was talking about public education, but his words resonate deeply with journalists today as we struggle against political, cultural and market forces to provide the public with the power that knowledge gives.

A critical tool in that struggle is the Freedom of Information Act, which, in that Madisonian spirit, guarantees citizens access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

President Lyndon Johnson had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” to the Freedom of Information Act signing ceremony. He “hated the thought of reporters rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the government version of reality,” according to his press secretary, Bill Moyers, who went on to become one of America’s most trusted journalists.

Nevertheless, Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966, saying it “springs from one of our most essential principles: A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits.”

But too many public servants don’t get it. They simply don’t trust the public with the information required to make good decisions about their government.

Even here in Sonoma County.

On Feb. 11, while reporting a story on how the Sheriff’s Office paid $1.35 million of your tax dollars to settle a brutality claim by a man who was maimed by a deputy’s police dog in 2020, Press Democrat reporter Jeremy Hay learned that the victim had been pulled over two days earlier by a deputy in what was described as a tense encounter.

Hay reached out to the Sheriff’s Office for comment, but the public relations staff do not work on weekends. Efforts to reach Sonoma County spokesman Paul Gullixson, a former journalist, were also unsuccessful.

Hay had enough to proceed with a story on the settlement because he had an official court record, which verified it was true. He held off writing about the traffic stop, however, because he had no official report, and the people who could provide it were radio silent.

Hay handed the story off to county government reporter Emma Murphy, who began placing calls to members of the Sheriff’s PR team on Feb. 13. Deputy Rob Dillion replied that because it was a holiday, no one was on duty. He agreed the allegations were serious, but said Sheriff Eddie Engram was a “busy man” and was unavailable for an interview.

Meanwhile, reporter Colin Atagi put in a formal request for access to body-worn camera footage and dispatch audio from the stop. There is nothing in the California Public Records Act, the state version of the Freedom of Information Act, that prevents them from releasing the body camera footage.

On Feb. 14, as we prepared to publish, Murphy received a call from another sheriff’s spokesperson, intimating that there was more to the story and offering to let her view the body-worn camera footage, but only “off the record.”

The term has a very specific meaning to journalists and public officials: Murphy could not write about what she saw in the video or refer to it in any way in her story.

To be sure, journalists do enter off-the-record arrangements, invariably because the information is not available any other way. And we follow strict ethical and professional guidelines before entering into those agreements.

(We follow the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which you can find at SPJ.org.)

We held the story another day. Dillion again offered to allow us to view the videoon an off-the-record basis.

Murphy, deputy investigations editor Brett Wilkison and I spent 17 minutes on the phone with Dillion, trying to understand why he would insist we view the video but not report what it shows. If he had evidence that helped the sheriff look good, why not show the whole world?

Dillion’s rationale was, frankly, baffling: If he released the video, his office would be besieged with other video requests from the public.

“We’re a law enforcement agency, not a video release agency,” he told us.

We declined Dillion’s offer and published Murphy’s story on PressDemocrat.com on Feb. 15 and in print the following day.

On Feb. 16, the Sheriff’s Office,posted 41 minutes of the 56-minute traffic stop on its Facebook page. Publicly, just as we had requested.

The post was accompanied by a video in which Engram, who had been unavailable for comment for four days, praised his deputies and excoriated The Press Democrat’s story as an insult and a disservice to his deputies. Engram made a point of stating that we had refused an opportunity to review the video.

But Engram left out the conditions that would have prevented us from reporting what we saw in the video, and he never addressed why he refused to release publicly releasable video that he believed exonerated his deputies.

Other inconsistencies arose once we finally saw the video. Murphy was initially told that deputies didn’t know whom they had pulled over. The video, however, shows that Jason Anglero-Wyrick and his wife repeatedly told deputies to call in his name to dispatch to find out who the deputy was dealing with.

When a supervisor arrived on the scene, he could be heard telling Anglero-Wyrick that it looked like he had a history of not listening to what the police told him to do. To which Anglero-Wyrick replied, “yeah, and I have a history of winning $1.3 million lawsuits against you.”

And that $1.3 million is exactly the point, especially for Sonoma County taxpayers. Sadly it’s only the latest legal settlement the county has paid in use-of-force cases involving the Sheriff’s Office.

In the last five years alone, the county has paid out more than $13 million to settle at least five cases, and it has been forced to spend many more millions in increased insurance premiums because of them.

In a meeting that Executive Editor Richard Green and I attended with Engram, Dillion and civilian spokeswoman Misti Wood earlier this year, Wood said the Sheriff’s Office didn’t need the press, that they prefer to connect with the public through social media. She boasted that the department has a dozen people involved in social media operations, though not all are engaged full time.

But the word they put out is only what they want you to hear.

Indeed, a search of the sheriff’s Facebook page makes no mention of the Anglero-Wyrick payout or any of the other $13 million in settlements.

The incidents that led to the payouts did not happen on Engram’s watch, though he was a member of the Sheriff’s Office command staff when most occurred. When he ran for office, he knew this was part of the agency’s legacy.

Perhaps that is why, in addition to Wood and Dillion, his office continues to pay $2,500 to $3,000 a month to a public relations firm to spin “critical incidents” for the department. That doesn’t appear on the sheriff’s Facebook page either. We don’t know if Engram consulted with the firm in this case, but we have requested all bills and correspondence between the Sheriff’s Office and the company to find out. These should be publicly available under the California Public Records Act.

To be sure, Engram is not the only public official with a transparency problem. Santa Rosa police have yet to release the body-worn camera footage from when they served a search warrant on Councilman Eddie Alvarez more than a year ago, a warrant that The Press Democrat had to file suit in court in order to see.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

If officials don’t have the staff to fill public records requests, they should go to the Board of Supervisors and request money to fill their legally mandated duty to provide public information. Or they could reassign some of their social media team. Or dump their PR consultants and use the money to provide the public with the records the public paid for.

But accountability is like gunfire: politicians and governments run from it rather than toward it.

The late muckraking journalist I.F. Stone once said that every government in the world is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed. But I’m not that cynical. I’ve seen too many wonderful public servants who toil thanklessly to improve the lives of their communities.

I prefer a phrase from a certain former president from California who said, “trust, but verify.”

So we’ll keep asking questions as we do our best, as Madison said, to arm you with the power which knowledge brings.

John D'Anna is The Press Democrat's senior news director for investigations.

You can send letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com.