Salinas enters an era of more transparency around policing.

Last week’s cover story on California’s new police transparency law, SB 1421, and how local agencies are responding to requests for previously confidential information about police behavior – whether sexual assaults under color of authority, lying about an investigation, perjuring themselves on the stand or any other number of acts that could get them disciplined and fired from their jobs – created a lot of reaction, much of it not what I expected.

From one police officer: It was tough to read, but fair. From another: “Good. Maybe that’ll get their attention.”

And from Spencer Critchley, the city of Salinas’ acting public information officer: We want a correction.

Specifically, he told Editor Sara Rubin, he wanted a correction of a single sentence: that in 2014, a year in which Salinas police shot and killed four men in separate confrontations, the city refused to release information about the officers involved. In that section of the cover story, I lumped Salinas in with other jurisdictions where police had been involved in notorious public acts, from the killing of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri to the killing of an unarmed black BART passenger in Oakland.

A lot has happened in the ensuing five years, but my memory of one event is clear. In 2014, Critchley coordinated a call with then-Chief Kelly McMillin and City Attorney Chris Callihan and invited a number of news organizations, including the Herald and KSBW, to participate. At the outset of that call, the city made a highly unusual request for a group media event. They wanted part of the call to be off the record, meaning none of the media could write about what was discussed. After Claudia Melendez-Salinas, then a reporter for the Herald, and I protested mightily, we listened to why the police didn’t want to release the names of officers in the recent shootings.

In June 2014, Rubin, then the Weekly’s Salinas reporter, wrote that the city, in response to a Public Records Act, was withholding the names of the officers involved in three fatal shootings, based on officer safety concerns.

“At this time, the city declines to disclose any records which identify the Salinas police officers involved in the [2014] shootings,” Callihan wrote in a June 10, 2014, letter. In an email to Rubin, Critchley writes the line in last week’s cover story is wrong because of the “at this time.” On one thing he’s right: The city eventually released the names – four months after the conference call, wrangling by the media and a state Supreme Court decision in favor of transparency.

Critchley also objects because the 2014 shootings were reviewed by two federal agencies, at McMillin’s request, in addition to internal reviews and one by the District Attorney. He claims the sentence reflects the Weekly’s bias. “All found that the shootings were legally justified given the threats presented,” he writes. “SPD doesn’t belong in a list of what are commonly understood to be notorious police abuses, like anyone who’s been thoroughly investigated and cleared wouldn’t belong in a list of notorious criminals.”

Fair point, but the officer who shot Michael Brown was never charged either. And on March 4, when the Sacramento DA announced there would be no charges for the killing of Stephon Clark, protests erupted, leading to dozens of arrests.

Something has changed in the past few years in Salinas – a new bent toward transparency. On Feb. 1, for example, Salinas police shot and wounded an armed man near the Safeway store on Constitution Boulevard; on Feb. 8, Police Chief Adele Frese released the names of the officers and District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni held a press conference in which she released body-cam footage and further details, even as the investigation is still ongoing.

On March 1, Salinas police killed an armed woman following a multi-hour standoff (see story, p. 12). On March 5, Frese released the names of the officers involved. All three are long-time veterans of the department.

Salinas Mayor Joe Gunter, a retired homicide detective, tells me he looks at these situations from a “former cop perspective. “Tell it like it is, let the public know and it helps them keep their faith in you,” Gunter says. “There’s no ‘we can’t tell you’ anymore.”

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or twitter.com/maryrduan