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. Continue reading →

In less than a month, there have been four killings, including three shootings, of local residents by San Bernardino County law enforcement officers.
Three of those occurred this week.
On Thursday, January 22, an officer-involved shooting took place in Riverside after San Bernardino County Sheriff’s officers, including detectives and deputies, attempted to apprehend Jaque Rabon, 23 of Loma Linda, whom the department referred to as a “high-risk” suspect. Those officers, including members of the department’s specialized enforcement division, had obtained a felony arrest warrant for Rabon, who had a history, according to the department, of “utilizing explosives and was reasonably believed to be armed.” The no-bail arrest warrant for Rabon was based on his alleged involvement in a robbery, assault with a semi-automatic firearm and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.
The attempted arrest, however, was not effectuated cleanly, and Rabon led the enforcement party on a pursuit through Riverside at around 10 a.m. The chase came to an end at the Tyler Mall, where the suspect led deputies into a parking lot at 3782 Tyler Street. A shoot-out took place and Rabon was killed.
The immediate vicinity of the parking lot where the shooting occurred was closed off to allow detectives with the Riverside Police Department to conduct an investigation into the shooting.
In addition to the Riverside Police Department’s inquiry, the California Department of Justice/Attorney General’s Police Shooting Investigation Team initiated an investigation in accordance with Assembly Bill 506 guidelines. Upon completion of the investigation, a report will be turned over to Department of Justice’s special prosecutions section within the criminal law division for independent review.
Roughly 12 hours before the shooting in Riverside, a Chino police officer shot and killed a man the Chino Police Department said shot at the officer during a traffic stop on Wednesday night, January 21. Continue reading →

Serious questions attend the manner in which the sheriff’s department allowed two extremely sociopathic and violent prisoners to share a single cell at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga earlier this week, resulting in the violent death of one of them.
There is a suggestion that the men’s jailers may have subjected the older of the two prisoners – 38-year-old Zacarias Joseph Ruiz – to the presence of the younger – Isaiah Mark Bailon, 26 – as a form of extrajudicial gratuitous summary punishment because of the repulsive nature of some of the older man’s crimes.
As a consequence of his most recent go-round with the law, Ruiz, whose last known actual residence was listed as being in San Bernardino, had until his death on January 20 been incarcerated since May 5, 2025 after having been arrested that day at 11201 Benton Street in Loma Linda for being in unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, trespassing on railroad property and refusing to leave property on which he was trespassing. He had pleaded not guilty to those charges but was also facing charges relating to domestic violence and issuing criminal threats charges from 2024 that he had failed to appear on. He remained in custody the entire time since May, and was listed as ineligible for bail while awaiting a mental health hearing.
Ruiz had a substantial number of criminal charges lodged against him going back more than two decades.
Since 2005, he had been charged with seven misdemeanors, which resulted in four convictions, including carrying a knife, vandalism, disturbing the peace and battery on a spouse. He was repeatedly – at least three times previous to his arrest in May of 2025 arrested and charged with trespassing but not convicted.
Ruiz was also convicted of three felonies, extending to two sexually-related offenses – unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor in which the perpetrator was over the age of 21 and the victim was under the age of 16, in 2011 and lewd or lascivious acts with a child aged 14 or 15, in 2016 – as well as assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury, for which he was charged in 2015 and convicted in 2016. Continue reading →

We are writing to formally express our strong opposition to the proposed establishment
Residential Care Facility-Addiction Recovery in our community;
Specifically, we are referring to Project# PRAF-2025-00003, proposed to be located at
6748 Coriander Drive in Oak Hills 92344. An application for an entitlement to establish the facility was filed on August 13, 2025 by Dr. Sulaiman Masood, who is represented by Tamara Soussan’
While we understand and respect the importance of rehabilitation programs and support for individuals seeking recovery, we believe this specific location is not appropriate due to serious safety and quality-of-life concerns for residents. Our neighborhood is a family-oriented community where children regularly ride bicycles, ride horses, play outside, and walk the streets. Many families chose to live here specifically because it is a quiet and safe environment away from establishments. We believe it is also important to note that a bus stop for the local elementary school is located directly in front of the above mentioned address.
Introducing a halfway house in this area raises significant concerns regarding increased crime, drug-related activity, loitering, and individuals wandering the streets. These risks would directly impact the safety of children and families who rely on the neighborhood being a secure place to live. Unfortunately, communities with similar facilities have experienced issues that place an additional burden on local residents and law enforcement. Because of the nature of being in an unincorporated area, emergency facilities are not close by and oftentimes emergency response times are longer than ideal. Continue reading →

Tom Schwab, whose prudent personality inhabited City Hall and became the embodiment of civic governance in Grand Terrace for 22 years, has died, 16 years after he left the helm of the city. He was 68 when he moved into eternity on December 13, 2025.
Born August 17, 1957 in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Thomas Joseph Schwab was the third of four sons of James and Catherine “Kay” Schwab. James was a chief master sergeant with the Air Force who over his 32-year career served in military bases around the world, including in Japan, where he met Kay. Shaped by his 50 percent American/50 percent Japanese heritage and his itinerant family lifestyle that exposed him and his brothers Mike, Dan and Jim to life in Asia, England and multiple U.S. communities, including San Bernardino and Norton Air Force Base in his teen years. That led to his matriculation at California State University, San Bernardino, from which he graduated in 1979.
Immediately after graduation, Schwab became a full-time municipal employee, having landed a position as an accountant in the City of San Bernardino’s finance department. Three years later, he was hired as the finance director with the City of Porterville.
In 1984, Seth Armstead, a retired United States Air Force Colonel who had been his father’s commanding officer at Norton Air Fore Base and who had become Grand Terrace’s first city manager upon the city’s founding in 1978, tapped him to serve as finance director in Grand Terrace. In 1987 upon Armstead’s retirement, Schwab became city manager of the 3.5-square mile 9,400-population city.
He remained in that role for 22 years. Located in heights above Colton and San Bernardino, the community, which is positioned at the southernmost end of central San Bernardino County against the Riverside County frontier, grew and matured prior to its incorporation from an agricultural district into an upscale residential community that housed many of the successful entrepreneurs with businesses in Colton, San Bernardino and Rialto. Continue reading →

This month, the Redlands Lawn Bowling Club eclipsed the 103rd anniversary of its founding. The green where the sport first took place and root in Redlands yet exists, along with the historic structures built by the club, such that Redlands remains a venue for the pastime, which is a relative rarity in Southern California.
The bowling club, located on the grounds of Sylvan Park at 411 North University Street, was founded in 1923 by real estate developer Melvin L. Hooper with the assistance of Dr. Frank H. Folkins. That was two years after aficionados of the sport began playing the game on the same spot in Sylvan Park.
The Redlands Daily Facts ran an article on November 1, 1921 remarking that lawn bowling had been taking place at Sylvan Park over the two or three previous Saturdays, and crediting Melivin Hooper as instrumental in initiating the competitions.
Hooper, originally from Canada, fancied himself as a crack player.
The activity proved popular enough that competitions became regular events at Sylvan Park, which was proximate to the stone zanja, an aqueduct constructed by Spanish settlers more than a century previously.
There was already a lawn bowling club in Pasadena at the time. Led by Hooper, a group of Redlands residents formed what was the second long bowling club in Southern California, officially chartering the chapter on January 24, 1923.
Popular in Italy and other countries in Europe, the origin of lawn bowling is traced to ancient Egypt around 5,000 B.C. A relatively familiar form of the game existed in Rome, with the modern sport and its formal rules having been developed and refined in Britain, with the oldest surviving green in Southampton, England, dating to 1299. Continue reading →

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, 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 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 violated 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 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 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is indeed applicable in San Bernardino. The 14^th 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 14^th 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.