Your County Civil Grand Jury: The citizen watchdog you’ve probably never heard of
Imagine getting teamed up with 20 strangers, being given subpoena powers, and being told to go investigate government corruption. Well, that’s what happens every year, in every county in California. And it actually kinda works!
This story was written by Ljuba Youngblom & Rick Marron, the creators of Hometown: Oakland.
Let’s get started
Ok. Most people don’t know this, but each year a batch of twenty or so volunteers from all over the county get chosen to be part of the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury.
Their mission: investigate misconduct in local government, and bring what they find to the public.
These people work nearly full time for almost no money, none are professional investigators, and this has been happening in every county in California for over 150 years.
And the crazy thing is: it actually kind of works.
Ok…so any random person can be on this grand jury?
Kind of. Any adult US citizen who lives in Alameda County and speaks English can apply.
A county judge reads through the applications and chooses the 30 most qualified people, usually people with professional experience that might be helpful. The names are put into a (literal) box, then the number of people they need for the jury is drawn at random.
The biggest factor that affects who serves is who applies and whether they can go a year without getting paid. It might not surprise you that most of the people on the Alameda Civil Grand Jury are retired.
(Technically they do get paid, but it’s only $15/day plus transportation costs.)
Got it, so what kinds of things do they investigate?
Grand juries can investigate any organization that receives public money, like city and county agencies, school districts, public transit agencies, jails, and hospitals. They can also investigate public officials and elected representatives.
They’re looking for evidence of misconduct like spending public money inappropriately or other kinds of mismanagement.
For example:
- In 2019, a grand jury discovered that the Oakland Unified School District was wasting millions because of their “broken administrative culture.”
- In 2014, they discovered that City of Oakland fire inspectors were only checking two-thirds of the commercial buildings in the city, but claimed on their website to be checking all of them. (The Ghost Ship fire happened in one they missed.)
But how do they know what to investigate in the first place?
Anyone can submit a complaint they’d like the grand jury to investigate, and every single complaint is reviewed. As a matter of fact, you could submit one right now!
Many grand jurors also come into the job with ideas for what to investigate from their experiences as residents of the community (though they’re not allowed to be part of an investigation they have a personal stake in.)
Lastly, the previous year’s jury often leaves suggestions for what this year’s jury should work on.
So say they have a hot lead on what to investigate. What happens next?
This is where it gets a little fuzzy, since grand juries operate in total secrecy (more on this in a minute), but basically, a small team of jurors breaks off and begins that investigation by gathering and reviewing official records, interviewing the people involved, and working to find out what’s going on.
But they’re just regular people. How do they know how to conduct an investigation?
Good point. Most of them have never worked as professional investigators.
Grand jurors in Alameda County do a month of government orientation and training to get them started. They’re also mentored by a superior court judge and have access to legal and government experts to help keep them on track.
While they may not be experienced investigators, they try to match jurors with cases where their professional experience will be helpful, like:
- an accountant investigating a city agency’s finances, or
- an electrical engineer investigating a power utility’s equipment inspection practices
Ok, but then why would anyone they’re investigating cooperate with them?
This is where it gets really interesting. Grand juries have broad subpoena powers, which let them get access to just about any piece of information they need, or interview anyone they want. Lying or refusing to cooperate with a civil grand jury is a serious crime.
Wow. Let me think about that for a second.
Sure, take your time.
So, I know I’ve heard of grand juries before, but they didn’t seem to work like this.
You mean like the one involved in the Mueller report?
Yeah! Why is that?
So “grand jury” literally just means a big jury: a large group of people deciding something, which we use in a lot of different ways in our democracy.
The type of grand jury you tend to hear about in national news is a “criminal grand jury,” which is totally different than what we’ve been talking about.
A “criminal grand jury” listens to a prosecutor’s case against someone suspected of committing a crime, and decides whether they should be brought to trial at all.
In a “civil grand jury,” on the other hand, there’s no prosecutor and the jurors are doing the investigating themselves. A civil grand jury is concerned with any type of serious misconduct, whether or not it counts as a crime, and only within organizations receiving public money.
Ok, back to civil grand juries then. Once they’ve finished an investigation, what do they do?
They release a report of the problems they found, along with recommendations for how to fix them. By law, the people or organizations the report is about have to respond in writing within 60–90 days.
For each finding, they have to either:
- Agree
- Disagree and explain why
And for each recommendation:
- If they’ve implemented it, they have to describe how they did it.
- If they plan to implement it but haven’t yet, they have to describe what they’re going to do and when.
- If the situation needs more analysis, they have six months to do it and respond with what they found and what they’re going to do.
- If they don’t plan to implement the recommendation, they have to explain why it isn’t reasonable or needed.
So what’s stopping someone from just saying that every recommendation in the report is unreasonable?
To answer this question, it’s important to remember that there are other people and institutions who care about what the grand jury finds, like elected reps, the press, and the public.
A civil grand jury report brings important problems to the attention of those who have the power to do something about them.
For example, if a grand jury found that the a city’s finance department was being sloppy in their bookkeeping, the press could write a story about it, and the public could complain to the mayor or whoever has the power to change things.
I see, but what if the report gets something wrong?
That happens sometimes. Government is complicated and grand jurors aren’t expert government investigators. Sometimes they don’t get the whole story and the response from the investigated person/organization calls them out on it.
There are a few safeguards against this, though:
- For the report to ever be released, the team of jurors that wrote it has to get approval from a supermajority (about two thirds) of the grand jury.
- Grand jurors are personally liable for defamation if they harm someone’s reputation with false accusations.
- And like I said before, they take a legally binding oath of secrecy to never talk about things that aren’t in the final report.
Still, there must be other ways it could be improved?
Absolutely. Civil grand juries in California have been around since the 1850s, and since then the system has evolved and improved. There are a number of suggestions out there for how it could be better.
- Longer terms: Some jurors complain it takes a year to hit their stride and get good at investigating, but by that point their term is up and they have to step down.
- Better institutional support: The amount of training, administrative support, and even office space they get is different depending on the county. More support would help them do their work faster.
- Getting paid: Grand jurors tend to be over 55 (and often much older) and well off, because those are the people who can work for a year without getting paid. Paying jurors a livable salary could lead to a grand jury that is more representative of the county’s population, which could lead to better and more equitable investigations.
That makes sense, but this all seems kind of messy.
You’re not wrong. For what it’s worth, the U.S. is the only country that uses civil grand juries this way and California is the only state that requires each county to have one.
Remember, it’s a pretty old system, and it was designed at a time when local government was much simpler and didn’t do as much to help people.
The thing to keep in mind is that in local democracies like ours, we grant authority to officials and institutions to represent our interests and make our cities better places to live.
A civil grand jury keeps an eye out for us, and helps us make sure those officials and institutions are using that power properly.
This isn’t hypothetical, either:
- When the school district wastes millions of dollars and children suffer, we should hear about it.
- When your water bill goes up because the utility is overpaying their employees, we should hear about it.
- When a poorly-maintained sewer system leaks into a community lake, we should hear about it.
To be healthy, democracy requires an active process of granting and checking power. It’s messy, and we might not even know it’s there sometimes, but we’d miss it if it were gone.
That sounds pretty awesome.
I know, right. Part of me wishes I could be part of a grand jury, but it’s hard to imagine how I could take a year off work.
This was fun. Thanks for chatting!
This story was originally written for Hometown: Oakland.
