By Mark Gutglueck
In a bold move signaling it is siding with San Bernardino’s municipal establishment in its deepening political and legal contretemps with Seventh Ward Councilwoman Treasure Ortiz, the district attorney’s office on January 8 criminally charged her with two counts of illicit electronic eavesdropping.
Central to the case is Ortiz’s production last year of what she and her legal team allege is prima facie evidence establishing elements of the San Bernardino Police Department in coordination with current and former city officials violated U.S. Privacy Act and California Penal Code Sections 11105 and 13300-13305.
Notably, the evidence being adduced by the district attorney’s office against Ortiz – an audio recording of a conversation among Ortiz, then San Bernardino Sixth Ward Councilwoman Kimberly Calvin and San Bernardino Police Officers Association President Jose Loera which took place on August 15, 2024 and a separate conversation among Ortiz, San Bernardino-based Developer Scott Beard and San Bernardino Police Chief Darren Goodman that occurred on August 29, 2024 – is key evidence cited in Ortiz’s lawsuit against the city filed in November 2025.
Already within the community, there are variant perspectives forming and hardening with regard to whether the evidence in question implicates or vindicates Ortiz or whether it condemns or exonerates the city, the members of the city council who are locked in seemingly intractable disputes with Ortiz, the police department, its police chief, its officers and the union that represents them.
Moreover, the district attorney’s criminal filing appears to be setting the stage for a potential precedent-setting legal determination about the admissibility of evidence and whether the Constitutional protections guaranteed to citizens over the intrusion of government conversely extends to protect of government from intrusion by citizens.Over the last eight years, as Ortiz transitioned from a moderately civically active resident who gradually rose to the status of an elected official, she has simultaneously grown more and more at odds with the city’s political elite, among whom and with she serves on the present city council. Though she has not eschewed entirely associations, her initial alliances in San Bernardino appeared to run essentially in keeping with some of the forces with whom she now has disputes, an understandable manifestation of the highly volatile nature of politics in San Bernardino County and in particular the county seat.
Ortiz’s activism was from the outset, it seemed, mixed with a dash or more of political ambition. In 2018, when then-Third District County Supervisor James Ramos ran successfully for the California Assembly, Ortiz was among the 37 of the residents of the county’s Third Supervisorial District who applied for appointment in December 2018 to serve out the two years remaining on Ramos’s term as supervisor. She did not get the appointment.
In the same November 2018 election in which Ramos made the transition from a local county-level politician to a state officeholder as a member of the legislature, in the San Bernardino mayor’s race, incumbent Carey Davis was displaced by then-Third Ward City Councilman John Valdivia, who had risen to political prominence as a protégé of former City Attorney Jim Penman. As a consequence of his acceptance of the mayor’s gavel, Valdivia was obliged to resign as Third Ward councilman. The city, instead of having the council appoint someone to fill in as Valdivia’s successor as Third Ward Councilman for the remaining two years on Valdivia’s term, opted to hold a special election to fill the void. Ortiz, who was a resident of both the city’s Third Ward and the county’s Third District, cast her hat in the ring to succeed Valdivia, as did two others, Anthony Aguirre and Juan Figueroa. For a political neophyte, Ortiz put up a spirited battle, but was no match for Figueroa, who had the advantage of Valdivia’s endorsement. Valdivia, who had cultivated a formidable political fundraising apparatus and the support of the city’s powerful public safety employee unions representing police officers and firefighters, was then at the peak of his political influence. The Third Ward was his home turf and political base and his support of Figueroa carried the day on May 21, 2019, when the polling in the specially-scheduled election in Ward Three took place. Figueroa cruised to an easy victory, garnering 68.29 percent of the vote to Ortiz’s 27.12 percent and Aguirre’s 4.59 percent.
Despite the loss, Ortiz gained attention and established herself as a vocal opponent of Valdivia and what was then his ruling coalition on the city council. In this way, Ortiz found herself, more inadvertently than deliberately, in an unspoken alliance with Valdivia’s two most pronounced opponents on the city council, Seventh Ward Councilman Jim Mulvihill and Fourth Ward Councilman Fred Shorett.
Over the next few years Ortiz emerged as Mayor Valdivia’s most strident critic, out-vocalizing Mulvihill and Shorett. Simultaneously, through a combination of political blunders, an arrogant presumptuousness, use of his mayoral authority to militate on behalf of his political donors and benefactors to the disadvantage of his constituents and sheer heavy-handedness, Valdivia gradually lost the support of three of the council members upon whom he had relied when he first became mayor – First Ward Councilman Ted Sanchez, Second Ward Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra and Fifth Ward Councilman Henry Nickel. This left Valdivia isolated and progressively less and less effective as mayor, with only two reliable votes that he could count on to support him in the initiatives he brought before the council, those of Figueroa and Sixth Ward Councilwoman Bessine Richard.
In 2020, council members Nickel, Richard and Mulvihill were voted out of office, replaced, respectively by Ben Reynoso, Kim Calvin and Damon Alexander. Valdivia, whose already diminished political leverage was eroded further by Richard’s departure from the council, was unable to cultivate Reynoso and Alexander as allies, whereupon his political reach was attenuated further.
Valdivia continued to be beset by political challenges, not the least of which was Ortiz, who assailed him and city policies and action under his watch with a continual stream of criticism in statements during council meetings, on social media and other community forums.
In the 2022 election, Valdivia found himself challenged for reelection by six hopefuls, including his former mentor, Penman, who professed to have lost faith in him; Ortiz, who had garnered a reputation as being the mayor’s sharpest-tongued critic; Nickel, who had previously supported and opposed Valdivia during his time on the council; and the city’s former director of human resources, Helen Tran In that year’s June primary, Valdivia, despite having a political war chest that was filled with more than twice as much money than the other six candidates combined, managed only a third place finish, besting Ortiz, who finished fourth, by a relatively slim margin. The two top finishers were Tran and Penman. In the November 2022, mayoral election runoff, Tran bested Penman.
In the aftermath of Valdivia’s political exile and Trans ascendancy, Ortiz did not desist in her political advocacy of the residents and elements of the community she had previously maintained were neglected and overlooked by the Valdivia Administration. Her criticism of the previous policy carryovers did not diminish and somewhat pointedly, despite the changeover to Tran’s leadership, her expressions of dismay with City Hall seemed to intensify. Despite the at-least partial commonality of purpose she had with Sanchez, Ibarra, Shorett and Alexander, who like her had all been out of synchronization with Valdivia, she was unwilling or unable to adhere to the conventional approach of a formulated compromise and give-and-take approach that would conform to more-or-less with the lion’s share of Tran’s goals and accommodation of each of the council members’ top two-or-three priorities. Instead, Ortiz’s status as persona non grata with the Valdivia regime extended into the Tran era and Ortiz was soon being disparaged as a perennial malcontent. Her lone points of entrée with the newly composed political establishment consisted of Councilwoman Calvin and Councilman Reynoso, who were similarly disenfranchised from the mayor and remainder of the council.
In 2023, as the filing period, which took place in the late fall, for the 2024 San Bernardino municipal elections, which coincided with March 2024 California Presidential Primary Election, was approaching, word spread that Penman, considered a representative of the city’s old guard, was considering yet another political comeback in the form of a challenge of Alexander to represent the city’s Seventh Ward on the city council. That was matched by an indication that Ortiz, who had moved out of her former residence in the Third Ward to a domicile in the Seventh Ward was likewise contemplating getting into the race.
Within a short span of time, Penman and/or his supporters, on the belief that a concerted push by a single candidate to oust Alexander would succeed but that a crowded field in the 2024 race for the Seventh Ward council position would divide and dilute the majority of voters in the Seventh Ward dissatisfied with City Hall and redound to the benefit of Alexander as the incumbent, sought to dissuade Ortiz from getting into the race. Among Penman’s supporters were a substantial number of police department employees who were favorably disposed toward him because of his long-term support of salary and benefit increases for police officers during their contract negotiations with the city while he was in the capacity of city attorney and as a mayoral candidate.
In October 2023, the San Bernardino Police Officers Association began circulating among a select number of Seventh Ward voters what was represented as being a “survey” with regard to attitudes toward Alexander, Penman and Ortiz to determine the likely performance of the three in the upcoming election. In actuality, the survey was a push poll. A push poll is an electioneering ploy disguised as a public opinion survey, designed to influence or “push” voters away from a candidate by delivering negative, often false or incomplete, information under the guise of research. Unlike legitimate polls that collect data, push polls use loaded questions to sway opinions. The October 2023 push poll circulated by the police union or by political operatives working on Penman’s behalf who claimed to be affiliated with the police union utilized information relating to a 2006 distress phone call Ortiz had made as the basis to allege she was involved in a domestic violence incident, asking, somewhat disingenuously, if the voter/survey responder would be more or less likely to vote for Ortiz upon considering that she had been arrested for engaging in domestic violence.
Following the distribution of the poorly-disguised political attack piece targeting her, Ortiz acceded to Penmen’s request that she meet with him. On November 8, 2023, she maintains, she met with Penman, at which time he 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.
Ortiz did not withdraw as a candidate, and in the March 2024 Primary Election, she proved to be the top vote-getter in the Seventh Ward contest, with 39.04 percent of the vote to Penman’s 31.12 percent and Alexander’s 29.84 percent.
As Ortiz prepared for the November 2024 run-off against Penman, she obtained from a source deep within the police department further confirmation of what she already knew, which was that the overriding majority of the members of both the San Bernardino Police Officers Association and the San Bernardino Police Management Association were favorably disposed toward Penman and were intent on supporting him in the campaign heading into the November election. Ortiz was further informed that groundwork intended to allow the department to assist Penman in the campaign against her been laid years ahead of the 2024 election, in fact, in 2020.
At that time, members of the department and the police union, which were already heavily invested in perpetuating Valdivia’s political career, were growing concerned about his eroding leverage over the city council, and they recognized that Ortiz represented a threat to his continuing grip upon the mayor’s gavel. At that time, some of those members of the department most committed to Valdivia made use the police department’s resources to do what is called “opposition research” for the mayor.
In March 2020, 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, accessed the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to obtain any and all information he could relating to Ortiz.
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, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System maintained by a consortium of law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories 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 carrying out investigations pertaining to crimes and/or suspects reasonably believed to have been involved in or perpetrating crimes.
Ortiz’s initial inquiries with the department about what she had learned were ignored. It was recognized that she was a candidate for city council and had leg up going into the final, having capture the most votes in the primary, but it was also recognized that the Police Officers Association was endorsing her opponent. Her reputation as a troublemaker who was inveterately displeased with the city and everything city officials were engaged in preceded her. There appeared to be little upside to dealing with her, and no one, it seemed, was up to dealing with her on any sort of official basis.
In late July, Ortiz succeeded in obtaining Police Chief Darren Goodman’s attention long enough to get him to focus on the issue she had circumscribed about how she had been informed that the department’s access to the California Department of Justice’s database had been exploited for political use that had not legitimate law enforcement application. Goodman expressed skepticism at her claim. Ortiz challenged the police chief to prove that her claim that her name had been run through the CLET System was, as he implied, a fabrication. In a response Goodman would eventually come to regret, he committed to requesting an audit with the California Department of Justice to ascertain if such an inquiry into Ortiz had been made by the department.
On August 8, 2024, Goodman contacted Ortiz, informing her that the California Department of Justice had responded to his request that it do an audit of the running of her name through the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System and that it had been verified that her name had been run and information pertaining to her retrieved from the database. Goodman apologized for having expressed doubt about the veracity of what she had told him and for the department’s invasion of her confidentiality. He identified Desrochers as the party that had accessed the system in retrieving her file, provided her with the date and time that the access had been made and told her there was going to be a criminal case put together against Desrochers, based on his illegal use of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System.
Goodman said he would get back to Ortiz, particularly referencing the provision of the Department of Justice Audit Report documentation of the CLETS readout Desrochers had obtained pertaining to her.
Six days later, late in the morning on August 14, 2024, Ortiz texted Goodman, inquiring about the Department of Justice Audit Report. Goodman said he would attempt to schedule a meeting with her the following week to go over the report.
Over the course of the afternoon and into the evening, there were internal department communications between Goodman and other members of the department at the command level about the misuse of CLETS and its application for political purposes, in particular how it had, at the very least, the appearance of being related to the San Bernardino Police Officers Association’s endorsement of Penman.
Police Officers Association President Jose Loera was brought into the conversation, whereupon a consensus was developed that it would be best all around for the Police Officers Association to rescind its endorsement of Penman.
At 9:54 p.m. Goodman texted Ortiz to let her know he was still working on the matter.
Discussions continued among principals in the police department until late in the evening.
The following morning, August 15, 2024 at 6:41 a.m., Goodman texted Ortiz, telling her he had arranged for her to have a meeting with Loera and for her to please accede to meeting with the police union president. At 7:24 a.m., Loera texted Ortiz, and they arranged to meet that afternoon at DJ’s Coffeehouse.
By the time that meeting took place at 2:45 p.m., the Police Officers Association had made a withdrawal of its endorsement of Penman, Penman had put out a statement he was respectfully and graciously declining the Police Officers Association endorsement because he did not want anti-law enforcement forces to attack the police department because of its association with him and Ortiz arranged to have Councilwoman Calvin accompany her to DJ’s.
At the meeting, Loera told Ortiz and Calvin that he had not been aware of Desrochers use of the CLETS database for political purposes until the previous day, but that he had been thoroughly brought up speed with regard to what had happened. He owned up to what had occurred.
“I’m here to formally apologize for what they did in the past,” Loera is heard saying on an audio recording of the meeting. “Clearly, I got a phone call yesterday. You got a phone call too. And I was just like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Like, that’s just the way they told me was, ‘You need to sit down.’ I’m like. ‘What happened?’ First of all, I thought that one of my members was injured. I was like, ‘Oh, my God something happened, right?’ And they told me. I was like, ‘Oh, Hell, no, there’s no way. There’s no way.’ Because, we, during that time, clearly, [Previous San Bernardino Police Officers Association President Jon] Plummer and I were not in charge. And something happened: that. You know that. It was the guys, the people that were in charge at that time. And that is not the way we do business – ever since Plummer and I took over. While Plummer’s not in charge anymore, I am. We said we were different, right? And when I heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna burn down the house right now, because that is not okay, one hundred percent, you know, and I immediately removed the endorsement of Jim Penman, canceled the forum and all that stuff, because it’s not okay. It’s not. It’s not what Plummer and I created. It’s not.”
Ortiz responded, “Well, that’s not what Jim Penman says. Jim Penman has a whole narrative out that he withdrew.”
Loera said, “What?”
Ortiz clarified, “He withdrew his support, his endorsement, your endorsement from him because you’re being attacked by a hostile, anti-cop candidate who is lying about all of this.”
Loera said, “No, that’s not true.”
Ortiz said, “But his statement is out there and your guys’s isn’t.”
Loera asked, “On what?”
Ortiz explained. “He [Penman] put out a statement,” she said. “You guys haven’t put out a statement.”
Loera acknowledged, “No, we have not, because I wanted to have a conversation with you, because we’re paying, obviously, we’re paying for the mistakes of our forefathers, which is the person that was who did it.”
Loera told Ortiz that she should pursue pressing criminal charges against Desrochers, one of his predecessors as union president.
“Do what you got to do with the criminal portion of it, which I highly recommend because it is a crime doing that,” Loera told Ortiz. “The same way you hold bad people accountable. I get it.”
Goodman was unable to schedule an appointment with Ortiz for the following week as he had hoped, but two weeks to the day after Ortiz’s and Calvin’s meeting with Loera, he was able to confer with her in person. Accompanying Ortiz was Scott Beard, one of her major political contributors.
Goodman brought with him to the meeting a print-out of the audit showing that Desrochers had run her name through the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System database.
Upon showing Ortiz the audit report, Goodman indicated to both Ortiz and Beard that he was seeking to have Desrochers prosecuted by the district attorney’s office for having unlawfully utilized the department’s equipment and informational databases. He indicated that he believed a criminal case could yet be made against Desrochers, even though four years and the timeline within which a crime must be prosecuted, which is specified in the penal code under what is referred to as the stature of limitations, had elapsed.
“The statute of limitations is on the date of discovery [of the crime’s commission], which is why I’m pursuing the charges on Desrochers, because it’s from the date of discovery, not from the date of which he did it, which was back in 2020,” Goodman is heard saying on the audio recording. “So, we just learned about it now. I’m going to submit to the DA now and hopefully, they will file it.”
Goodman indicated his belief that, measured by both Desrochers’ intent and what the information he obtained was used for, the offense the former Police Officers Association president had engaged in constituted a serious offense.
“It’s a minor crime to just run someone you like, you know: ‘Oh, I’m just curious where this person lives” versus ‘I want information and then I’m going to use this information to hurt this person.’ That’s a whole other level,” Goodman said. “And that’s how I feel about this, and I want to nip this in the bud and, quite frankly, want to make an example of Desrochers, whether he is retired or not, to send a message to anybody else that’s playing these games.”
Goodman told Ortiz and Beard he was in the course of preparing the case to be presented against Desrochers by compiling a report along with the evidence of how he had used the state law enforcement data base for an illegitimate purpose.
“I’m planning on going forward,” Goodman is heard saying. “The DA has already been notified – not the DA but the DA’s office – and they know this is coming and I wanted to preface it with them because of the whole concern about the statute of limitations and I said, ‘Hey, look, I think this is different because we just discovered it’ and they said, ‘Yeah, you might be right and there may actually be some exceptions because there is a lot of new law based on use of technology and use of information from criminal databases.’ So, we’re hoping that they see it that way once it gets there and they see the entirety of the report.”
A little more than two months later, in the November 2024 run-off against Penman, Ortiz registered a relatively convincing 11.5 percent victory to capture the Seventh Ward council position, capturing 3,929 votes or 55.78 percent to Penman’s 3,115 votes or 44.22 percent.
The following month, with the installation of the three new members of the council, Ortiz among them, Mayor Tran was hoping to form a consensus on the council that would allow her to log more achievements in the second two years of her first mayoral term that would serve to convince the city’s voters to grant her a second term. Initially, there was not just a show of but actual bonhomie on the council dais that created the perception that Tran’s hoped-for formula of granting each of the council members an opportunity to bring back to their districts go-ahead on projects or programs to benefit their constituents while creating an atmosphere of cooperation that would facilitate her achieving broader objectives for the city as a whole.
At the public level, it is unknown whether Ortiz in closed-session discussions sought to convince her colleagues to in some fashion address the police department’s interference in the Seventh Ward election or if in making such a request she dwelt on the police department’s opposition to some of their electoral efforts, including bankrolling and orchestrating campaigns against Shorett and Ibarra, which likewise involved some underhanded tactics.
By March, the prosecution of Desrochers that Loera encouraged Ortiz to involve herself in and which Goodman had suggested was to be forthcoming had not manifested. Concerned that the issue, which had already been pushed to the back burner, would soon be taken off the stove completely, Ortiz filed a claim against the city on March 28, 2025, filed a $2 million claim against the city over the incident, asserting a detective had accessed the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to obtain information relating to her and then allowed that data to be used in the campaign against her.
On May 5, without Ortiz participating, the city council voted 6-to-0 to reject the claim. Shortly after the council vote, Mayor Tran publicly stated the claim was “frivolous, filed in bad faith, dishonest and an attempt to swindle the City of San Bernardino out of $2 million. 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,”
Tran did not stop there. “In her initial report of the matter to Chief Goodman and in numerous social media posts and recorded videos she stated that she has never been arrested,” Tran said. “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.”
In social media postings, Ortiz referenced Goodman’s August 29, 2024 statements and Loera’s August 15, 2024 statements, quoting some of them verbatim.
The city responded by disputing that the police chief and police union president had stated that officers had acted illegally or that members of the police department had misused the law enforcement data bases available to them. The city issued a public warning to Ortiz that further assertions of the type contained in her claim would lead to charges against her for filing a false police report.
Ortiz then went directly to the district attorney’s office, marshaling what evidence she had and providing investigators with the audio recordings of the exchanges with Loera and Goodman at the August 15, 2024 and August 29, 2024 meetings.
On November 5, 2025, Peter Schlueter, an attorney based in Grand Terrace, filed on Ortiz’s behalf a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles alleging 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. The suit cited the November 8, 2023 meeting with Penman in which he said the San Bernardino Police Officers Association would carry out a blistering campaign against her if she did not get out of the race, along with both Loera’s and Goodman’s acknowledgments that the CLETS file on her had been accessed. The lawsuit included quotes of Goodman taken from the audio recording of his August 29, 2024 meeting with Ortiz and Beard.
According to the lawsuit, Ortiz’s intention to seek election in the 7th Ward was generally known in San Bernardino and a consensus had formed among the members of the San Bernardino Police Officers Association and the San Bernardino Police Officers Management Association to support Penman in his run for the 7th Ward post. The police union’s determination to keep her out of office resulted in the union publicly disseminating confidential and sequestered information from government files that are maintained for identification and specified investigative purposes which Desrochers had accessed in his capacity as a detective with the department, which crossed the legal line.
The city responded by hiring attorney Stephen Larson, a former federal judge, to handle its defense of the lawsuit.
The city issued a statement that “An independent investigator hired by the City of San Bernardino confirmed that no one conducted an illegal search of the CLETS system, which is heavily regulated and audited annually by the State of California Attorney General’s Office.” In a joint statement, Mayor Tran and the city council characterized the Ortiz lawsuit as a complete misrepresentation of the facts and an unfair disparagement of city employees and officials in an attempt to obtain millions in taxpayer dollars from the city.
In the weeks following the lawsuit’s filing, to press inquiries, city officials declined to specify who the independent investigator was, refused to release the investigator’s report, said they could not clarify whether the investigator’s inquiry had taken place before or after Ortiz filed her claim against the city in March or before or after the lawsuit was filed and could not offer any definitude with regard to whether the investigator had been provided with the statements made by Chief Goodman in his exchange with Ortiz and Beard on August 29, 2024 or the chief’s text messages with Ortiz on August 14, 2024 or whether the investigator considered or had been provided with the statement made by Loera to Ortiz and Calvin on August 15, 2024.
On January 8, the contretemps between the City of San Bernardino and Ortiz plummeted to a yet greater depth when the district attorney’s office seemingly leapt to the city’s defense filed a criminal case against her alleging she had recorded conversations with members of the police department without their knowledge or consent in violation of California Penal Code Section 632(a). The filing, while making no direct mention of Goodman or Loera by name, referenced August 15, 2024 and August 29, 2024 as the dates of the offenses.
The filing remained publicly unremarked, but on January 21, during the first regularly scheduled council meeting of the month, with Councilwoman Kim Knaus as mayor pro tem presiding over the meeting in the absence of Mayor Tran, Deputy City Attorney Albert Maldonado made mention of the criminal filing in reporting on issues discussed during the board’s closed-door discussion prior to the public portion of the meeting. The issue that had been agendized for that closed session discussion was Ortiz’s lawsuit against the city. Maldonado reported that the council had voted 5-to-0 to release an apparently previously prepared press release relating to the criminal charges against Ortiz. He then read the press release, which announced that the district attorney’s office had filed made a criminal filing against Ortiz for allegedly violating Penal Code Section 632(a), engaging in the nonconsensual recording of or eavesdropping on confidential communications.
Continuing to quote from the press release, Maldonado then, without explaining the statements Ortiz had recorded contradicted the city’s contentions, read, “Previously, Councilmember Ortiz filed a federal lawsuit against the City of San Bernardino seeking over $2 Million dollars in damages for what she asserts was an illegal search of the CLETS system in March 2019.  An independent investigator hired by the City of San Bernardino confirmed that no one conducted an illegal search of the CLETS system, which is heavily regulated and audited annually by the State of California Attorney General’s Office. Based on the independent investigation, Mayor Tran and the city council characterized the Ortiz lawsuit as a complete misrepresentation of the facts and an unfair disparagement of city employees and officials in an attempt to obtain millions in taxpayer dollars from the city.”
Redoubled efforts by the Sentinel to obtain from the city a copy of the independent investigator’s report was rebuffed as was a request that the city identify the investigator. According to city spokesman, the investigation was conducted by a “highly qualified, experienced, and independent firm to review and investigate the allegations.” The city was unwilling to say whether Goodman and Loera had been interviewed by the firm and how the firm had reconciled the statements Goodman and Loera had made on the audio recordings Ortiz is now accused of illegally obtaining and the conclusion that “no one conducted an illegal search of the CLETS system.”
“At this time, the city will offer no further comment on the criminal matter which is the responsibility of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.”
The District Attorney’s Office, officially, is proving equally tight-lipped, indicating it will be making no public utterances with regard to the case, and is to confine its provision of information relating to Case No. 2026-00-0000627 People vs. Ortiz to court filings.
Thus, the Sentinel was rebuffed in its efforts to learn whether the prosecution has familiarized itself with the federal lawsuit filed by Schlueter on Ortiz’s behalf, whether the prosecution had considered the statements by the city denying that the illicit accessing of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System vis-à-vis Ortiz had taken place, whether the district attorney’s office has reached a conclusion as to whether Desrochers was acting legally or illegally in accessing that material, if prosecutors had ascertained whether the San Bernardino Police Department was engaged in a legitimate criminal investigation of Ortiz when it pulled the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System file relating to her and what crime or crimes potentially perpetrated by Ortiz were being investigated. Similarly, the Sentinel was unable to wring from the district attorney’s office what individuals beyond Ortiz, Calvin and Beard it had contacted in looking into the allegations of illegal eavesdropping and recording. The district attorney’s office, likewise, was unable to offer an explanation as to why it had fixated upon Ortiz as the perpetrator of the Penal Code Section 632(a), despite the physical presence of Calvin and Beard at Ortiz’s meetings with Loera and Goodman in August 2024. Prosecutors were unable or unwilling to respond to how, precisely, the district attorney’s office reached the conclusion that Calvin and Beard were not responsible or involved in the recordings and why they had not been criminally charged.
According to Schlueter, the criminal theory against Ortiz will not endure, as the assertion that Ortiz made the recordings without Loera’s and Goodman’s knowledge and therefore implied consent will not hold up.
“The conversations were not meant to be confidential,” Schlueter maintains. “They discussed evidence of a crime by a third party and statements made to law enforcement can be used in a criminal case. The participants knew the plaintiff was recording the conversation.”
To be sure, the criminal case the district attorney’s office is bringing against Ortiz is fraught with omnidirectional danger.
Insofar as Ortiz is concerned, while violation of Penal Code Section 632(a) is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, it yet stands as an illegal act, and two convictions for committing a crime in which she disregarded the privacy rights of two law enforcement officers, including the chief of the police department of the city she represents on the city council, will hardly increase her electability as councilwoman or to any other office she may seek. The recordings of Loera’s and Goodman’s utterances, which she willingly and purposefully provided to the district attorney’s office are the most damning evidence against her. If those tapes do not project the voices of Loera and/or Goodman explicitly consenting to be recorded, the prosecution will be in a position to say, ipso facto, that Ortiz intruded on their privacy in much the same fashion that Desrochers intruded on hers. Added to this is that the witnesses to be arrayed against her are all law enforcement officers, to whom juries in general and juries in San Bernardino County in particular give especial credibility, officers who as part of their training are taught to testify in a way that will leave a jury convinced that they are on the side of justice. More difficult still, the prosecution’s star witness is not to be just any officer but rather San Bernardino’s chief of police, Darren Goodman, whose reputation proceeds him. Perhaps most importantly, Ortiz is being prosecuted by a district attorney’s office headed up by Jason Anderson, a politician himself who was a councilman in Ontario two decades ago, prior to being elected district attorney, who is well known for his reluctance to prosecute his fellow and sister politicians, so much so that despite the level of corruption throughout the county in which well over a score of elected officials have immersed themselves, virtually no or very few officeholders and only those at odds with the political establishment have been prosecuted under his watch. That he has set his office’s sights on Ortiz is a sure sign that he is not faffing about and will bring everything he has to bear to gain a conviction.
For both Goodman and Loera, the prosecution of Ortiz is fraught with the potential that they singly or dually will be confronted on the witness stand with the glaring contradiction between what they said in their August 2024 exchanges with Ortiz and her associates and what the city is now saying and what the city maintains they are now saying. Goodman and less prominently Loera are being cited by the city in its narrative that Ortiz and her attorney fabricated the accusation that the police department had made illegal use of the criminal information databases at its disposal out of whole cloth and that whatever investigation the police department might have engaged in with regard to Ortiz was based on probable cause, legitimate suspicion and perhaps actual wrongdoing or criminality on her part. The city is staking its position and its defense of the civil suit brought by Ortiz on the credibility, integrity, propriety and honesty of Desrochers, whom both Goodman and Loera disparaged as having engaged in wrongdoing and being worthy of prosecution. Goodman in the run-up toward the 2024 election grew accommodating of Ortiz, who had yet to be elected but ultimately would be, and accorded her the respect reserved for the city’s established officeholders. She utilized that opportunity to seize information that has the potential of fully manifesting as a legal and reputational disaster for the city. Despite Ortiz’s electoral success in 2024, she was never on a trajectory to be granted entrée into the political establishment in San Bernardino. This political tone deafness on Goodman’s part, depending on how the prosecution of Ortiz and her lawsuit against the city hash out, could create an atmosphere in which his remaining as police chief would be inconceivable.
The city has as much riding on the prosecution of Ortiz as anyone or any entity. Despite the fiction that there is a firewall between the city’s legal battle with Ortiz and the district attorney’s office’s prosecution of her, the latter grew out of the circumstances of the former. Based on both circumstance and the strength of the evidence Ortiz and her lawyer have cultivated, the city has been reduced to its best shot at Ortiz being a single bullet in the district attorney’s gun. If Anderson shoots too high or too low and misses, Ortiz will emerge not mortally wounded or even injured but stronger.
Anderson and the district attorney’s office have gone out on a limb, calculating that Ortiz and her legal team a) will not have the staying power to see both the civil and criminal cases through to the end; b) the criminal defense expertise to prevent Ortiz from being overwhelmed by what is being thrown at her and c) allow the case to be manipulated into a courtroom and before a judge who will allow what is, after all, a less than earth-shattering misdemeanor case to be tried along the very limited parameters of the charges against and prima facie evidence against her and prevent the defense from presenting or the jury from considering any contextual background to the case, which the prosecution is prepared to argue is irrelevant to the substance of the charges.
There is a perception alive in the San Bernardino County community that Anderson’s filing of the two Penal Code Section 632(a) charges against Ortiz is a means to an end that is based more on a political agenda than protecting the public. Illegally recorded conversations are generally inadmissible in legal proceedings. By obtaining a conviction against Ortiz on the Penal Code Section 632(a) charges, legal experts have said, Anderson would effectively prevent Schleuter from using the August 2024 recordings of Loera and Goodman in Ortiz’s civil trial against the city. Handicapping Schlueter in such a way that the lawsuit was dismissed would further ingratiate Anderson with the political establishment in the county seat. Nevertheless, if Schlueter is able to find an alternate way of illustrating to the jury the contradiction between the attitude Goodman and Loera had with regard to Desrochers’s use of the department’s law enforcement database in August 2024 and the position the city is taking with regard to his activity now, the city’s chances of successfully defending against Ortiz’s lawsuit would diminish. Anderson’s failure to obtain a conviction of Ortiz while simultaneously subjecting Goodman and Loera to a defense cross examination that leaves them in the positions of having to explain the diametrically different characterizations of Derochers’ guilt and innocence when talking with Ortiz in 2024 and in their statements since that time as they have been called upon to shore up the city in defending against the councilwoman’s suit could prove damaging to not just their credibility but that of their department. Anderson’s success as a prosecutor hinges largely on the credibility of the police officers who gather evidence and testify in support of convicting the defendants they arrest.
The case is an extraordinary one from multiple perspectives and presents, potentially, a forum for the testing of a basic constitutional issue.
Penal Code Section 632(a) prosecutions historically were relatively rare, but have become more frequent in recent years because of the easy and widespread availability of recording devices, in particular the availability of smartphone recording technology. The vast majority of Penal Code Section 632(a) prosecution grow out contentious domestic or workplace disputes and in the context of civil litigation. The case against Ortiz presents a wrinkle in that it involves a civilian recording the words of two law enforcement officers rather than other civilians. This is taking place at a time and in an environment in which police personnel in general have been armed with bodyworn video and audio recording devices. To accommodate this trend, there are cut-outs in the law which except law enforcement officers, essentially, from laws and statutes such as Penal Code Section 532(a), and law enforcement personnel are not required to obtain consent to activate their recording devices from those they encounter to function in the field and in their interaction with the public.
Arguments that have been made by the representatives of local government, police departments and various agencies law enforcement and otherwise in defending the ubiquitous and continuous unannounced used of bodyworn recording devices by government officials are manyfold. One is that they are used to provide evidence or information relating to the commission of a crime or crimes. Another is that they are being responsibly and sensibly used by responsible individuals who are acting in accordance with legal authority and that the product of the recording capability is used to determine truth in circumstances where there are conflicting accounts among those present or participating in action that is of social consequence. What Ortiz’s case presents is a stark question as to whether the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is indeed applicable in San Bernardino. The 14th Amendment mandates that individuals in similar situations be treated equally by the government. She is now confronted by a situation in which there is now a dispute as to what was true and actually occurred when she was on a hunt to determine whether there had indeed been a violation of the law, such that the city is maintaining that Detective Desrochers did not illegally and without requisite purpose seek and obtain her profile from the statewide database available to the police department. She utilized a recording device to obtain evidence relating to that alleged or suspected crime from Chief Goodman and Police Officers Association President Loera. The question will become, if Schleuter has the inclination, patience and perseverance to pursue it, whether, under the 14th Amendment, citizens such as Ortiz are to be permitted to ferret out the truth in the same way that agents of the government such as Goodman and Loera are empowered, and whether citizens should be given license to utilize tools such as an audio recorder in arriving at that truth.
Before the Federal Court for the Central District of California takes up that question to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the case against Ortiz might turn on another issue.
Ortiz might reasonably anticipate that if the court takes up the question of whether she did or did not inform Loera and Goodman that she was recording them and it comes down to her word against theirs, the court will side with the two sworn professional police officers. Still, it might not be that simple.
On August 14, 2024, among the text messages that went back and forth between Ortiz and Goodman was one relating to Goodman’s audit of the CLETS database and the file therein pertaining to Ortiz which Detective Desrochers had accessed, which began at 10:39 a.m and ended at 10:41 a.m.:
Ortiz: “I would just like to pick up a copy of the full audit. Do you need anything from me for filing against the guy who did it?”
Goodman: “Yes, we will need statements from you. I have a detective working the case against the former officer.”
The next morning, Goodman texted Ortiz, telling her he was setting up a meeting between her and Loera, and encouraging her to make the meeting.
There is room to interpret the police department’s invitation to Ortiz to participate in an exchange of information with department members regarding a matter the department was investigating as giving her clearance to document what was said during the exchanges she was to have with those officers. It is possible, if not likely, that when Ortiz goes to trial, her attorney will make an argument that was the case and request that the judge hearing the matter instruct the jury to consider the question of whether Goodman asking her to meet with the department’s officers constituted consent to record the exchanges before rendering a verdict.