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Grading local law agencies on openness

By CAL BEVERLY

Kudos to the big city paper for shining a brilliant spotlight on open government ideals and current realities faced by the general public in trying to obtain information about their own governments.

The AJC conducted a simple test of open records with metropolitan area law enforcement agencies. Send us crime statistics on major felonies for the past year, the paper asked.

Many law enforcement agencies ignored the request, while others only reluctantly complied.

In Fayette County, the surveyed agencies (the sheriff’s department, Peachtree City police and Tyrone police) got good grades for turning the requested information over to the paper. Fayetteville, the paper said, “inadvertently” was omitted from the test.

On the front page in this issue, we report on our Fayette legislative delegation’s votes this session on open records legislation. We intend to keep shining a bright light on the votes of our lawmakers and others in the area of openness of local government agencies.

How open are Fayette government agencies to public scrutiny? How welcoming are these agencies to Joe Public wanting to know what’s going on?

Let me give you a more up-close view of openness in Fayette County, agency by agency, from down in the trenches, far from the lofty perches of the AJC.

Law enforcement: Access is poor to fair. Truth be told, some local law enforcement officials would not grieve if another reporter never darkened their doorways. Unless there are TV cameras involved, for whom some local agencies love to strut their stuff.

Recently, I assigned a new reporter to gather more information than local agencies have been used to providing: the addresses of all arrested persons.

You would not believe the grief that seemingly simple request has provoked. In fact, the Fayetteville P.D. simply refuses to give us the information, saying it’s too much trouble. They claim their computer system can’t produce that information for us.

Does that sound believable?

It’s still an ongoing struggle to obtain daily the “face sheets” of incident reports from all local law enforcement agencies. They all want to do it differently and on their own schedules. This occurs despite the fact that settled Georgia law clearly specifies that all such police incident reports are basic public records subject to scrutiny by any interested member of the public.

Invariably, the agencies want you to know only the the bare minimum of what’s really happening in daily law enforcement activities and then only when they choose to release it.

Having done this for a few decades, I can testify that this reluctance has almost nothing to do with winning court cases, and almost everything to do with institutional paranoia.

There’s more than one local agency that punishes or rewards us with information based on whether somebody with rank is ticked off with us that week. Is that any way to run a professional government agency?

Access to police reports was easier and more open 30 years ago when I daily picked up routine and major case reports from the Griffin Police Department and Spalding County Sheriff’s Department one county over. I never knew a single case that was even remotely imperiled by such public access.

Fayette County law agencies still reside in the dark 1960s when it comes to ease of access to routine public information.

It’s particularly distressing when you consider that, unlike a newspaper, most folks just don’t have the resources (read, a public forum and the willingness to spend money on lawyers to sue the offending agencies and appeal all the way to federal court if necessary) to challenge the agencies’ tight-fisted approach to public records.

So here’s my grade for open records access in local law enforcement agencies:

Fayetteville police: F. They are pained by our even asking for access on your behalf. They refuse to turn over even basic information about arrested individuals. They balk at showing incident reports. The department has what is called a public information officer, but there’s precious little information being disseminated by that agency.

Fayette County marshals: F. Our recent routine request for information on whether they had radar units or had ever requested units was referred to the county attorney. Still no reply.

Peachtree City police: C. They resisted requests for basic information and still are reluctant to provide information beyond their own weekly, self-generated report of what they want you to know about. Their weekly report probably is an accurate summary, as far as it goes, but we have no way of independently verifying that every incident that might be of interest to the public is released.

Fayette County sheriff’s department: C, D and sometimes F. Depends on who’s ticked off that week. It’s difficult to reach their public information officer at the very time when you most need public information. But you can tune in to a TV station and find out the more spectacular stuff that may or may not get released to local media by the next week. The sheriff’s department is very TV savvy, but seems to view local media as nuisances for whom crumbs should be plenty.

Tyrone: B and maybe A. For years, nobody bothered even checking with Tyrone. We do now, and have been pleased with the general openness shown by Chief John Hay and his department.

Fayette County District Attorney’s office: Prior to Scott Ballard’s election last fall, F-minus. DA Bill McBroom wouldn’t even return phone calls. We are hoping that hometown lawyer Ballard will be more observant of the public’s right to know than his defeated predecessor.

All that said, I would like to say to local law enforcement officials: We here at The Citizen are ultra-pro-law enforcement. I think we like you a lot more than you like us.

Nevertheless, we work for the public, much as law officers do, and we ain’t going anywhere. So let’s all try to do our jobs and get along, while providing the public with as much information as legally possible about how their public servants are enforcing the law and how the public’s tax dollars are being spent.

Next installment: Grading local governments on openness and attitudes.