A reporter’s work on unsafe jails shows why California shouldn’t weaken its public records law

Kelly Davis was one of San Diego’s most consequential investigative journalists. She died earlier this month after battling cancer. She was 53.

The longtime reporter single-handedly forced the crisis of preventable deaths in San Diego County jails onto the front page of the public agenda. Her work won awards. She changed policies. She moved legislation. 

She saved the lives of people who will never know her name.

She also fought the county government when it came after her notes and tried to keep public records secret. 

In 2017, the San Diego Sheriff’s Office was sued by a widow whose husband died in county custody — one of dozens of preventable deaths Kelly reported on. 

Rather than answer for what happened, the Sheriff’s Office subpoenaed Kelly’s notes, interviews and confidential sources — materials that documented what jail employees had done and what they had tried to hide. 

The same agency that publicly claimed no knowledge of systemic problems in its jails — despite years of Kelly’s published reporting — demanded the work product of a journalist whose sources could damage them the most. And the Sheriff’s Office was using a grieving widow’s lawsuit as cover to expose those sources. 

Kelly refused. The press freedom community rallied. And a judge issued a stay. 

As classic author Ray Bradbury once wrote, “Everyone must leave something behind … something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.”

Kelly planted stories. They are still growing.

Her fight for jail transparency is precisely why Assembly Bill 1821 must not become law in any form that weakens California’s Public Records Act.

Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, a Democrat from Downey, introduced the bill with a stated goal of reducing burdensome and commercially motivated public records requests. The bill has since been amended under fierce public opposition. Much of what made it dangerous was stripped out. 

But what remains would still allow agencies to take 10 calendar days to respond to records requests, instead of 10 business days, and to have extensions of up to 14 business days. 

For communities that depend on timely information — disability rights advocates, environmental justice groups, families seeking answers about a loved one who died in custody — delay is not a minor inconvenience; it’s denial.

Earlier iterations of the bill would have allowed public agencies to charge up to $66 an hour to process some records requests. It would have empowered courts to weigh in on a requester’s “malicious intent.”  And it would have created new grounds to reject requests. 

Those provisions were beaten back, but the infrastructure for their return is there.

Kelly Davis proved why the Legislature shouldn’t rewrite the Public Records Act.

After 35 years in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office, I know how institutions respond to scrutiny and how they calculate the cost of transparency against the comfort of opacity. 

I also have filed dozens of public records requests in my post-retirement accountability work.  I’ve watched agencies use every available tool — delayed responses, defective extensions, overbroad privilege claims — to slow the flow of information the public has a right to see.

Kelly’s reporting on jail deaths, beginning in 2013, changed how I saw the system I thought I knew. 

She asked questions I had not thought to ask. She filed records requests nobody else was filing. She built the evidentiary record that forced Sacramento to act. 

That work was only possible because the Public Records Act gave her the legal right to demand answers. Weaken that right — even incrementally, even with the best intentions — and the next Kelly Davis may never get the records that become the next “Dying Behind Bars” investigation.

The California State Association of Counties reports a nearly 50% increase in public records requests over the past three years. That’s not a crisis of abuse. It’s democracy working.