Tuesday's amended lawsuit in San Francisco against the attorney general cites reporting on records that have been released by some agencies in response to more than 400 public records requests jointly filed by a coalition of news organizations, including KQED, the Bay Area News Group and Investigative Studios — the production arm of UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.

Those records so far have exposed an officer’s attempts to sexually exploit an arrested woman — prompting prosecutors to take a second look at criminal charges. They showed a former Southern California sheriff’s deputy, who also worked as an investigator for the state Department of Consumer Affairs, admitted to stealing thousands of rounds of ammunition over decades but was never charged with theft. And most recently, reporting on the records led to the dismissal of criminal charges against a Rio Vista woman who was mauled by a police K-9.



Attorneys representing KQED also criticized Becerra's veiled threat to take legal action against UC Berkeley-based reporters for possessing records about criminal convictions of California peace officers released under a different law. The journalists rejected a Jan. 29 demand from Becerra's office to destroy the "inadvertently provided" records and instead published preliminary findings with KQED and Bay Area News Group papers about some of the thousands of law enforcement officers with criminal convictions over the past decade.

"The Attorney General’s attempt to muzzle journalists who lawfully received public records about police misconduct suggests that [his office's] refusal to produce misconduct records ... here is part of a bad-faith pattern of attempting to frustrate public access about matters of the utmost public importance," Tuesday's amended lawsuit said.