It’s time to get bad cops off the street.

A six-month investigation by a collaboration of 30-plus newsrooms finds that more than 80 law enforcement officers working today in California are convicted criminals.

It could be far more. California has some of the strictest police secrecy laws in the country, hiding from the public centralized information on the wrongdoings of the officers patrolling our streets.

The state provides online information about the bad behavior of, for example, doctors, lawyers and real estate agents. But not the men and women whom we entrust to carry guns and protect our safety.

It’s time to change that.

State officials — lawmakers, judges and Attorney General Xavier Becerra — should stop coddling California’s criminal cops. It’s time to put transparency and public protection ahead of the interests of California’s politically powerful law enforcement labor unions.

The collaboration of news organzations was launched earlier this year after the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley obtained, through a public records request, a list of criminal convictions of nearly 12,000 people who have been law enforcement officers in California or applied to be one.

Becerra said the list was inadvertently released, that reporters were breaking the law by simply possessing it and that they could face legal consequences if they didn’t return it.

It seems the attorney general of the nation’s largest state is more concerned with protecting cops than protecting the public.

The list is exactly the sort of information the public deserves access to. And the findings of the investigation show exactly why. Not only has it exposed bad cops, it has also helped unmask a system that shields them.

The journalists narrowed the list down to officers who have worked in the last decade and, with other reporting, identified 630 current or former cops with criminal convictions in the past decade.

The convictions included driving under the influence, domestic violence. animal cruelty and even manslaughter. Nearly one in five are still working or kept their jobs for more than a year after sentencing.

Some of the investigation’s most disturbing findings center around domestic abuse cases. Abuse accusations against cops rarely result in criminal charges, much less convictions. When charged, police frequently take plea deals for non-violent misdemeanors, allowing them to avoid felony convictions that would cost them their jobs. Police departments let abusive cops keep working despite past abuse. And judges routinely grant convicted cops exemptions allowing them to keep their guns despite the convictions.

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Indeed, political pressure from police unions led lawmakers in 2003 to take away from California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training the authority to effectively license cops. Local law enforcement agencies are on their own to perform background checks that might flag criminal pasts. Little wonder bad cops keep working and getting rehired.

Californians shouldn’t stand for this. It’s time to resurrect state oversight of police and provide much-needed transparency that will ensure cops on the street have the honesty and temperament to be there.