The Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, a nonprofit organization, requested public records from the City of Gilroy related to police involvement in homeless encampment cleanups. The requests included body-worn camera footage from the City’s Police Department. The City produced some records, withheld certain footage as exempt under the California Public Records Act’s (CPRA’s) law enforcement exemptions, and advised the Law Foundation that older footage had been destroyed pursuant to its standard records-retention policy.
The Law Foundation sued, alleging that the City violated the CPRA by, among other things, failing to preserve records that were exempt from disclosure. The City won this issue in the trial court, the California Court of Appeal, and finally in the California Supreme Court.
The California Supreme Court framed the records retention question as: When an agency responds to a CPRA request by asserting that the requested records fall under a statutory exemption from disclosure, does the CPRA require that the agency retain the records for three years from the date the exemption is invoked? The Court answered no. The CPRA contains no express record-retention requirement tied to CPRA requests, and the Court declined to read such a duty into the law. Record retention and preservation obligations arise, if at all, from other statutes, regulations, or a public agency’s own retention policies.
City of Gilroy v. Superior Court, 2026 Cal. LEXIS 1 (Cal. Supreme Court 2026).