‘Right to Remain Secret’ wins George Polk Award for Justice Reporting

Katey Rusch and Casey Smith

On the heels of winning the Selden Ring Award, alums Katey Rusch (’20) and Casey Smith (’20) have won the 2024 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting for their two-part story “Right to Remain Secret,” Long Island University announced today.

The story, investigated and written through the UC Berkeley Journalism Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and published in the San Francisco Chronicle, exposes a system for concealing police misconduct by California law enforcement officers for decades.

Investigative Reporting Program Chair David Barstow and other IRP staff supported Rusch and Smith in a painstaking investigation of so called “clean record agreements” in California, from conception through publishing.

“Without the IRP, we would have never published this investigation,” said Rusch. “The program recognizes the potential of student-led investigations by green lighting and supporting their ideas. The IRP’s faith in young journalists’ ability is what makes the program so special, and I, for one, am incredibly grateful to be a part of it.”

Rusch also emphasized the importance of the story’s impact. “Because of this reporting, these secret deals are no longer secret,” Rusch said. “The public deserves to know about the conduct of law enforcement who wield immense power in their communities.”

The Polk Award announcement noted about “Right to Remain Secret”: “A product of five years of research, their stories detailed how dozens of police officers in California arranged to cleanse their records of damaging behavior and retire with lucrative pensions in secret deals that allowed their departments to avoid cumbersome dismissal proceedings.The practice was curtailed following these revelations.”

“This story took intrepid reporting to break through a system of silence and opacity that intentionally prevents accountability for police misconduct in California,” said Barstow. “We applaud our partners at the San Francisco Chronicle for the courage to hold power to account in publishing this investigation.”

This is the third Polk Award won by IRP-incubated stories in the last five years. In 2021, a Polk was awarded to “American Insurrection,” a collaboration with PBS Frontline and ProPublica culminating in a 90-minute documentary and companion 4,500-word article that examined the rise of far-right extremist groups in the United States by Ellie Lightfoot (’21), Gisela Pérez de Acha (’20) and Kathryn Hurd (’21).

Brian Howey (’22) won a 2023 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting for his exposé in the Los Angeles Times and podcast on Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting about a deceptive practice used by police when interviewing family members of people killed by police officers.

The award for investigative journalism is named for George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The 2024 award winners were selected from 493 submissions.