San Bernardino Councilwoman Treasure Ortiz on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the City of San Bernardino, the union representing its police officers and five former city employees in Riverside Federal Court, alleging members of the San Bernardino Police Department used federal, state and local databases that are restricted to law enforcement activity for political purposes in an effort to prevent her 2024 election.
Ortiz was elected to represent San Bernardino’s 7th Ward on the city council in 2024, capturing the top spot but less than a majority of the vote in that year’s March primary when she outpolled the incumbent, Damon Alexander, and former City Attorney Jim Penman. Ortiz then prevailed in the November 2024 run-off against Penman, capturing 3,929 votes of 55.78 percent to Penman’s 3,115 votes or 44.22 percent.
Ortiz previously competed, unsuccessfully, for mayor in 2022, finishing fourth in a field of &,7, and came up short in 2019 when she ran to represent the city’s 3rd Ward. Those followed her unsuccessful bid in 2018 to obtain appointment to replace James Ramos as San Bernardino County Third District supervisor following his election to the California Assembly.
Ortiz’s long-recognized political ambition has gone hand-in-hand with her criticism of the governmental and political establishment, characterized by her acerbic observations about the integrity and wisdom of various officeholders and high-ranking governmental staff.
Ortiz’s approach has had the effect of uniting sitting politicians and certain interest groups against her, in some cases consisting of unlikely coalitions of incumbent politicians who were not previously aligned or affiliated and in some cases rivals themselves, based primarily upon their common enmity toward her.
In some cases, these malleable alliances have engaged in pointed efforts to neutralize or discredit her.
According to Ortiz, there was a showing of determination to keep her out of office during the 2024 election season that crossed the legal line, which involved the accessing and public dissemination of confidential and sequestered information from government files that are maintained for identification and specified investigative purposes.
Ortiz maintains that in 2023 her intention to seek election in the 7th Ward was generally known in San Bernardino and that a consensus had formed among the members of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association and the San Bernardino Police Officers Management Association to support Jim Penman in his run for the 7th Ward post. In an effort to derail her candidacy, Ortiz maintains, the union utilized the a data base at the police department’s disposal – the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System – to retrieve information pertaining to a 9-1-1 call for assistance reporting domestic abuse in progress she had made in 2006, when she was 23 years old. The San Bernardino Police Officers Association, the union representing police officers below the command level, on October 25, 2023 sent a survey to 7th Ward residents seeking to determine if the consideration that Ortiz “has been arrested for domestic violence and was terminated from employment” would impact whom they would support in the 7th Ward race.
It is Ortiz’s contention that neither insinuation contained in the survey – that she had been fired or that she had been arrested for domestic violence – was true. The disingenuous implying that she had been arrested for domestic violence, according to Ortiz, was based on the 2006 distress phone call, which was illegally obtained by the police union.
The California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, known by its acronym, CLETS, and JDIC, the Justice Data Interface Controller maintained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Central Name Index, maintained by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, NCIC, the National Crime Information Center maintained by the FBI and NLETS, theNational Law Enforcement Telecommunications System maintained by a consortium of law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. terretories are database and information retrieval systems available to law enforcement agencies that are interlinked and intended to provide information relating to actual or suspected criminal activities, crime reports, incident reports, suspects, arrestees, those convicted of crimes, victims and witnesses. Use of and access to the system is supposed to be limited to law enforcement agencies and their officers who are engaged in legitimate law enforcement activity and investigations.
It is Ortiz’s contention that the police union acted improperly and illicitly in accessing the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System and applying that information in a falsified context to derive the October 2023 “survey,” which was a poorly-disguised political attack piece targeting her.
She met with Penmen on November 8, 2023, at which time, she maintains, Penman endeavored to persuade her to drop out of the contest against Alexander, telling her that the San Bernardino Police Officers Association was planning to carry out a relentless attack on her if she remained as a candidate.
In 2024, after Alexander had finished in third in the primary election and while she and Penmen were vying against one another in the November run-off, according to Ortiz, she addressed her concerns that the department was engaging in impermissible political activity to Police Chief Darren Goodman, who initially was unable to find any indication of the department conducting a CLETS search relating to Ortiz. In August 2024, less than three months before the election, according to Ortiz, Goodman found evidence that the department/police union had indeed run a search on Ortiz through the CLETS system, having done so earlier than previously thought, that being in 2020. Goodman told Ortiz and one of her political supporters, Scott Beard, that his examination of the department’s CLETS access history indicated that Detective Steve Desrochers, who had been the president of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association from 2016 until 2018 and had also served in the capacity of union vice president, had been the individual officer with the department who had accessed the CLETS file relating to Ortiz. Goodman told Ortiz and Beard that there was no conceivable legitimate law enforcement operational justification for the department accessing Ortiz’s file.
Ortiz was elected in November and on on March 28, 2025, more than three months after having been sworn in to office, she filed a $2 million claim against the city over the police department’s access if the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to obtain information relating to her and the application of that data in the campaign against her. The San Bernardino City Council rejected that claim on May 5, 2025.
In making that rejection, the city claimed Desrochers had done nothing untoward, wrong or illegal.
“The city’s review of this matter determined that the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, also known as CLETS, was lawfully accessed by authorized law enforcement personnel in March of 2020,” Mayor Helen Tran said on May 5. “The city’s investigation finds the claim to be frivolous, filed in bad faith, dishonest and an attempt to swindle the city of San Bernardino out of $2 million.”
According to Mayor Tran, “In her initial report of the matter to Chief Goodman, and in numerous social-media posts and recorded videos, she [Ortiz] stated that she has never been arrested. Following a thorough review of facts and circumstances surrounding the original report to Mr. Goodman and the claim that she filed, the city finds the information in the claim to be false and dishonest. For the reasons uncovered during the investigation into her allegations and a review of this claim, the city denies the claim.”
Under California law, those seeking redress against a governmental entity alleging to have been wronged, damaged or injured by the governmental entity or its employees have six months from
from the date of the injury or the date of the discovery of the injury to file a claim, where upon the governmental entity has 45 days to acknowledge or reject the claim. A citizen then has six months from the time of the rejection of the claim to file suit in state court or, if a denial is not registered within 45 days, two years to file suit.
In making its denial of Ortiz’s claim, the city when beyond its usual protocol of simply rejecting the claim to asserting that not only was there no substance to Ortiz’s allegations, but accusing her of dishonesty and daring her to proceed further in the legal process. Tran stated that if Ortiz were to file suit within the six month window then open to her to do so, “the city is putting her and her attorney on notice it will seek to recover all attorney’s fees in cause and accordance with California Code of Civil Procedure Furthermore, given that the false claims were filed under the penalty of perjury and it is a crime to make a knowingly false claim against a police officer, the potential criminal conduct associated with the claim is being reviewed.”
Tran, who suggested that Ortiz’s credibility in general and as a public official was already shot, said that Ortiz was further playing with fire and risking even greater damage to her reputation in that the city was not going to observe the normal rules of confidentiality applied when public officials have embroiled themselves in controversy.
“Given that the filing of a $2 million claim by a sitting council member is highly unusual and has been the subject of news and social media reports, the city will release information related to the investigation that was conducted and reviewed in connection with the claim,” Tran said.
In the ensuing five-plus months, the city made good on its threat, doing so in a series of statement made both on and off the record, the upshot of which was that Ortiz, whose stock-in-trade consists of vituperative, incendiary and deprecating comments against and regard to all order of public officials, is capable of dishing it out but cannot take it. Ortiz’s accusations were mired in self-serving truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, misleading assertions and outright falsehoods, the city propounded. No illegal or improper running of her name through law enforcement databases had taken place, it was asserted, and when she had been the subject of those searches, those queries grew out of a legitimate investigation or law enforcement operation. Most pointedly, it was hammered home, Chief Goodman had not said many of the things Ortiz attributed to him and she was misrepresenting the substance and meaning of other things that he had in fact said.
The reality was, city employees and officials said, there was much information in law enforcement databases that did not paint Ortiz in a pleasing light, and it would be just fine with them if Ortiz did file suit so that those salacious and uncomplimentary tidbits could be exposed in open court or in discovery documents as part of the litigative process.
As the November 5 deadline for Ortiz to file her suit grew closer and closer, day-by-day, week-by-week and month-by-month, the pronouncements from San Bernardino officials grew ever more definite, cocky and rude in predicting that Ortiz would not file suit.
With a dramatic flourish, Grand Terrace-based attorney Peter Schlueter,  at what would have been the final day to file a lawsuit in state court, filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of Ortiz, not ins San Bernardino County Superior Court but in federal court. Named in the suit are the City of San Bernardino, the San Bernardino Police Officers Association, former acting San Bernardino Police Chief Eric McBride, Desrochers, Police Officers Association President Jose Loera, Penman and Goodman along with ten unnamed John Does.

The city was caught somewhat flatfooted by the filing of the suit, so much so that it turned to an attorney, Stephen Larson, who had previously represented a plaintiff in his and his company’s successful lawsuit against the City of San Bernardino.
Whereas in 2024, Ortiz, who had yet to be elected to the city council, had what was, or appeared to be, the assistance and close support of Chief Goodman in her effort to stand off the political attacks utilizing information extrapolated from law enforcement databases, the police chief’s readiness to back Ortiz after she was in office and on the losing side of a 7-to-1 divide between her and her six council colleagues and the mayor had been greatly attenuated by early 2025. Ortiz, after being sworn into office in December 2024, had worked quietly behind the scenes and in the back halls of San Bernardino’s municipal offices to have the city come to terms with the police department’s use of its facilities and assets for political purposes and hold those she believed had used confidential law enforcement data to account. When that did not occur, she filed her claim on March 28.
At that point, Goodman clearly sided with Tran, six of the members of the council, the city, the police department and the union. Statements were circulated that did not quote Goodman verbatim, but which disavowed the statements which Ortiz had attributed to him during their interaction in August and September of 2024, one in which she said Goodman said that it was Derochers who in 2020 had accessed the CLETS database relating to her and the 2006 9-1-1 call for assistance during a domestic disturbance, that Desrochers had no legitimate basis to make the 2020 CLETS inquiry with regard to Ortiz, that if Desrochers had still been employed with the department he would have terminated him and that he was going to make a criminal case referral with regard to Desrochers’ unauthorized use of the department’s electronic database.
Highly disconcerting for the city is that both Ortiz and Schlueter have released portions of a transcript of the August 30, 2024 meeting between Goodman, Ortiz and Beard. Those transcripts provide what is purported to be verbatim statements during the back-and-forth dialogue between Ortiz and Goodman. This implies that the entire conversation was audio-recorded.
Several of the statements in the transcript attributed to Goodman essentially verify that element of Ortiz’s overall narrative, which is that Desrochers violated not only department policy but the law in accessing the CLETS database in an effort to find information that would prove politically damaging to Ortiz, that Goodman considered Desrochers’ action to be illegal and to constitute misconduct for which he should have been fired.
The City of San Bernardino, which is no stranger to civil suits filed against it by residents, citizens, individuals and occasionally its own employees, finds itself in the forum of state court defending itself with regard to those cases, as that is the most common venue for such matters filed against it. It has a number of go-to lawyers to work on its behalf in fighting these suits, including ones with the law firm of Best Best & Krieger, with which City Attorney Sonia Carvalho is a partner, as well as other attorneys specializing is specific areas of the law. In this case, however, Ortiz and Schlueter have hauled the city into federal court. One of the reasons the city turned to Larson is that he was formerly a a federal judge. The city’s hope is that Larson will be able to map an exit from the imbroglio with Ortiz in an expeditious manner that will not entail adverse publicity or extensive expense.
In the immediate aftermath of the filing of the suit, observers were quick to point out that despite whatever skill and familiarity with the federal court system that Larson might be able to bring to bear, even if he is somehow able to succeed in preventing the recording of the August contents from the August 30, 2024 meeting between Goodman, Ortiz and Beard from being introduced as evidence at trial on the basis that it is illegal to make such recordings in California without the consent of all parties so recorded, he will not be able to ameliorate the damage to the city’s reputation from its having claimed that Goodman never made the statements he can presumably be heard making on that recording.
For their part, Ortiz and Schlueter maintain that “This conversation was not meant to be confidential; it discussed evidence of a crime by a third party, statements made to law enforcement can be used in a criminal case, and the participants knew that Plaintiff [Ortiz] was recording the conversation.”