J. v. City and County of San Francisco

Background

Plaintiffs in two related cases sought documents from the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability’s investigation of a mass arrest. Plaintiffs in the J.T. putative class action sought all Department of Police Accountability materials. R.P., who was pursuing individual claims in the related case, specifically sought Captain Thomas Harvey’s interview with the Department of Police Accountability, although the opinion stated that R.P.’s requests might also cover other materials.

Defendants withheld the documents and invoked the official information privilege, a qualified privilege recognized under federal common law for certain government information. Defendants had not identified the withheld documents or explained the grounds for withholding them in a privilege log, as required by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5)(A).

Privilege Logs

The court stated that parties withholding otherwise discoverable information as privileged must expressly assert the privilege and describe the withheld documents sufficiently for the other parties to evaluate the claim without revealing protected information. The court found defendants’ failure to identify the materials in privilege logs troubling and said it was close to indefensible. It also questioned defendants’ assertion that the City did not know Captain Harvey had been interviewed, noting that the Department of Police Accountability is a City agency, though independent, and that Harvey was a defendant represented by the same counsel as the City.

The court did not resolve the dispute by deciding whether defendants had waived protection over the documents. Instead, it ordered the parties to exchange privilege logs by August 11, 2025, including logs for Department of Police Accountability materials responsive to document requests or covered by defendants’ initial disclosure obligations. The logs had to identify documents individually and give specific reasons for withholding them. The court also allowed the parties to submit an agreed stipulation concerning any limits on their privilege-log obligations, while reserving the right to reject or modify that agreement.

Production of Department of Police Accountability Materials

The parties agreed that the official information privilege required a case-by-case balancing of the interests of the parties seeking discovery against the interests of the government entity asserting the privilege. Defendants did not argue that the materials should never be disclosed. They argued that disclosure should be delayed until the investigation was complete.

The court found that defendants’ declarations did not explain why confidentiality interests and possible chilling effects were substantially greater before the investigation ended than after it ended. The court also found that plaintiffs had not shown a particularly urgent need for disclosure. R.P. had already deposed Harvey and had not claimed that the deposition prevented questioning about relevant topics. The J.T. plaintiffs wanted to review all officer interviews before continuing depositions, but the court stated that not all depositions necessarily needed to be delayed.

After balancing the competing interests, the court ordered defendants to produce Department of Police Accountability materials that were responsive to plaintiffs’ document requests or within the scope of defendants’ initial disclosure obligations no later than one week after the investigation and report were completed, and in any event no later than September 8, 2025. If defendants continued asserting privilege over some materials after that date, they had to provide a supplemental privilege log by the same deadline.

Additional Discovery Deadlines

If plaintiffs believed that previously completed depositions should be reopened after receiving the materials, or that a deposition in the R.P. case should be permitted after its fact-discovery cutoff, the parties had to meet and confer by September 11, 2025. They then had to file either a stipulation or a joint discovery letter by September 15, 2025. The court stated that it did not anticipate this process requiring an extension of the September 30, 2025 fact-discovery cutoff in the J.T. case. The parties in the R.P. case were also instructed to cooperate if either side wanted to supplement expert reports based on the materials or a later deposition.

Disposition

The court entered discovery orders requiring privilege logs and setting deadlines for producing the Department of Police Accountability materials. This was a procedural discovery order, not a decision on the underlying claims concerning the mass arrest. The order is signed by a United States magistrate judge, but the judge’s name cannot be determined from the provided opinion text.