This is the secret system that covers up police misconduct — and ensures problem officers can get hired again | UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

This is the secret system that covers up police misconduct — and ensures problem officers can get hired again

Behind locked drawers of file cabinets, in police departments all over California, sit documents no one is supposed to see.

Known as clean-record agreements, they conceal the misconduct of hundreds of officers, helping them land new jobs in law enforcement.

These documents have been secret — until now.

By Katey Rusch and Casey Smith

This story was originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle on September 18, 2024.

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 His firing would be rescinded.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.

Sierra County Court House Steps, the California Flag waves next to the parking lot.

The Sierra County Sheriff’s Office and courthouse in Downieville on May 1. Chris Kaufman/Special to the Chronicle

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.”

Photo of multiple cabinets, a large wooden cabinet and an smaller, open metal cabinet in Sheriff Mike Fisher's office.

The cabinet in Sheriff Mike Fisher’s office at the Sierra County Sheriff’s Office in Downieville, where records related to Hossep “Joe” Ourjanian’s alleged misconduct are kept “separate” and “sealed” per the terms of his clean-record agreement. Chris Kaufman/Special to the Chronicle

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.”

Camile Upchurch poses in Millenium Park in Chicago, she is carrying a black leather purse and wearing a blue dress under a white full-length coat.

Camile Upchurch poses for a portrait in Millennium Park in Chicago on May 8. Upchurch was injured by a police officer in Clearlake (Lake County) who had received two clean-record agreements. Laura McDermott/Special to the Chronicle

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.”

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.