Katey Rusch

Record Requests Manager and Data Journalist, California Reporting Project

Katey Rusch is a senior investigative reporter at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, where her work focuses on misconduct and secrecy in policing and public education.

In 2024, Rusch and Casey Smith published “Right to Remain Secret” in the San Francisco Chronicle, an investigation into the “clean-record agreements” California law enforcement agencies used to conceal officer misconduct and allow problem officers to be hired elsewhere. The series was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting and won the George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award, the Goldsmith Prize, an IRE Award and a National Headliner Award. It led to a new state law outlawing the agreements.

Rusch also works on the California Reporting Project, a coalition of more than 40 newsrooms, and helped build a first-of-its-kind database making some 1.5 million pages of once-secret California police records publicly searchable.

Before joining the IRP, Katey spent a decade as an on-air reporter and writer in local television newsrooms, including stops in Seattle, Phoenix, Bakersfield, Duluth and Topeka. As a video journalist, she won several Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award for a series about fracking and the energy potential of shale oil reserves. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.