Missouri Attorney General Claims The First Amendment Allows Him To Withhold Public Records

from the I'm-not-familiar-with-the-type-of-thing-I'm-seeing dept

Missouri's government is flexing the weirdest right now. The state's Attorney General is currently in court trying to keep public records out of the public's hands. This doesn't actually stem from a public records lawsuit, but from a discovery request in a defamation lawsuit filed by a former mayor against a state representative.

Ex-Scott City mayor Ron Cummins is suing state rep Holly Rehder for defaming him while he was still in office. His discovery request has been greeted with this baffling assertion by the Attorney General. (h/t Peter Bonilla)

Cummins' attorney requested communications from constituents making complaints to Rehder’s office.

Schmitt's office, which is representing Rehder, argued last week that turning over those records would “violate the First Amendment rights of the constituents that made complaints.”

That's… not something the First Amendment protects. It protects their right to make complaints, but doesn't protect the state's right to withhold documents. In fact, the state has no First Amendment rights. Those belong to the people, like those Schmitt disingenuously is pretending to shield from someone suing a politician over allegedly-defamatory statements.

The governor's office backed this dubious assertion by saying something weird about chilling effects.

The governor’s office defended the policy, saying citizens would not reach out to their elected officials if they believed information like email addresses and phone numbers could become public.

I don't think that's how this works. For one, most people realize that communicating with government entities turns those communications (in most cases) into public records. For another, citizens cannot create chilling effects. Some people may be wary of communicating with the government for many reasons, but if there's any chill, it comes from the government's obligations to the public, not from public records requests.

That the governor would back this baffling gambit isn't surprising considering the governor himself has some pretty strange ideas about how the First Amendment works. This happened earlier this year:

As state lawmakers continue their push to carve out new exemptions in Missouri’s open records laws, Gov. Mike Parson has seized on a new strategy.

His office is redacting information from public records citing the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

TIL: those black markers are called "First Amendments."

Steele Shippy, Parson’s communications director, said the office uses the First Amendment to redact telephone numbers, addresses and email addresses of private citizens who have reached out to the governor’s office.

Such is the state of the First Amendment in the Missouri state government. The First Amendment gets used to withhold public records and make unjustifiable redactions. And then I guess it gets put back in the drawer until the next time the government needs to use the First Amendment for something. The same incomprehensible claims were made about the chilling of speech in this case, too.

There is some good news, though. The state AG has officially withdrawn his insane First Amendment assertions.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has withdrawn a legal brief he filed arguing that the First Amendment allowed him to withhold some public records concerning private citizens involved in a lawsuit.

Schmitt said in a statement Tuesday that his office determined after further review that the assertion should be withdrawn.

"Upon further review" says the AG, implying it ever received a first one. As was pointed out by people who actually understand the First Amendment, the legal brief cited no case law to support this peculiar free-speech-by-redaction argument because no such case law exists. Perhaps the AG should rush these findings to the governor's office before any more public records are subjected to the state's First Amendment scalpel.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, attorney general, discovery, eric schmitt, holly rehder, missouri, public records, ron cummins, transparency

NYPD Screws Up Again; Hands Out Even More 'Secret' Facial Recognition Docs To Researchers

from the 'the-more-we-suck,-the-more-you-know'-rainbow.gif dept

The inadvertently great thing about the New York Police Department is its random inability to keep its secrets. Journalists have referred to the agency as being more opaque than redaction masters like the CIA and FBI. Its perpetual efforts to thwart public records requesters have led to insanity like refusing to release the department's public records response guidelines or years of stonewalling over innocuous information.

So, when the "fuck you, citizens" facade inadvertently crumbles, we are: All. Over. It. Back in April, Georgetown researchers received documents the NYPD surely did not mean to release. Included in the NYPD's release was a presentation on facial recognition software that it swore up and down (often in front of a judge!) was too sensitive to release to the public. This despite the fact the presentation was from a conference where any member of the public with $1,700 could view this super-sensitive slide deck.

The NYPD managed to talk a court into the ordering the impossible: the post facto memory-holing of documents researchers had already seen. The court said the researchers could not talk about the presentation's content and ordered them to "return" the PDF they had received, however the hell that works.

Well, fool themselves once, shame on the NYPD. Fool themselves two or more times, the court says, "You're on your own." The New York Daily News reports the NYPD has screwed the facial recognition pooch yet again. Unbelievably, it has made the same mistake twice while dealing with the same public records requesters.

For the second time in three months, city lawyers have mistakenly turned over documents about the NYPD’s facial recognition program to academic researchers and are asking a judge to order the information returned.

The NYPD paperwork recently handed over to the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology included names and case numbers of people who were run through the facial recognition system, city attorney Jeffrey Dantowitz said in a hearing Tuesday. The documents were marked for redaction but accidentally sent to the researchers.

The NYPD engaged in redaction failure. Not the kind where someone uses a PDF tool they clearly don't understand, but rather the kind of failure where redactions are never made. The NYPD's lawyer called the black bar omission "embarrassing." The court used different words to describe this failure.

“One was too much. Two is more than I can tolerate at this time,” [Justice Shlomo Hagler] said.

If the NYPD was hoping another irrational decision would be handed down, its hopes were dashed by an exasperated judge. Georgetown gets to keep the end result of the NYPD's inadvertent transparency. Even better, it gets to publish the things the NYPD somehow forgot to redact. And there will be none of this "return the PDF" bullshit.

Still, the NYPD's public-facing rep is apparently hoping if he says enough stuff to local press outfits, the judge will see fit to build a time machine for the malfunctioning NYPD. In an extended (given the circumstances) statement to the Daily News, NY Law Department spokesperson said such redaction failures occasionally occur. They apparently occur more frequently "in litigation" (as they have done twice!) and that there "exists a legal process" for getting the unredacted documents back from the inadvertent disclosees.

Good talk, but it seems the court has already shut that argument down. If the NYPD can't competently redact documents, it has no business asking the court to fix its fuck ups. That much seems clear from the judge's short, pointed statement.

Filed Under: foia, foil, nypd, public records
Companies: daily news

Records Requests Show Even More California Police Departments Started Destroying Records Before The Public Could Get Its Hands On Them

from the crosscutting-accountability dept

More details are coming to light about California's opacity activists. Faced with impending transparency, a handful of law enforcement agencies decided to fire up the shredders rather than risk turning over police conduct records to the public under the new public records law.

Inglewood's police department was given the go-ahead to shred years of responsive documents last December in a council meeting that produced no record of discussion on the matter or the council's determination.

Public records requests filed after the new law went into effect in January uncovered moves made by the Fremont city council to help local police rid themselves of records the public might try to request. The city lowered the retention period for officer-involved shooting records from 25 years to ten and allowed the department to destroy 45 years of police misconduct records it had decided to hold onto until it became inconvenient for it to do so.

Darwin BondGraham of The Appeal has discovered even more record destruction by California law enforcement agencies occurring ahead of the law's implementation.

Union City, a suburb adjacent to Fremont, also destroyed a large number of police records in June 2018 while SB 1421 was moving through the legislature toward the governor’s desk for signature.

Police shredded reviews of officer-involved shootings, vehicle collisions resulting from high-speed pursuits, and use of force reports from 1983 to 2015, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

In addition to these records, Union City police memory-holed 12 records detailing incidents in which officers fired their service weapons, including two "unintentional" shootings.

Meanwhile, over in Livermore, more police records were being purged, although city officials claim the destruction of records prior to the new law taking effect was just "routine" yearly destruction, rather than an attempt to rid the PD of documents it would rather not hand over to requesters. Routine document destruction is indeed part of most government agencies' practices, but some of what was done during this last purge seems anything but "routine."

Livermore is in the process of destroying files for 27 complaints made to the police department’s internal affairs unit during 2012, according to documents obtained through a public records request. A list of files doesn’t reveal the allegations in these cases, whether they were sustained, or whether any officers were disciplined.

Also on Livermore’s list of records to destroy are hundreds of use of force reports spanning 2008 to 2012, and six reviews of officer-involved shootings that occurred in 2009, 2011, and 2012.

While it's true California law only mandates retaining these records for five years, the purges happening here (and elsewhere in the state) show police departments are holding onto these records for much longer than they're legally required to. These records must have some value to the agencies if they're willing to retain them this long. And if they have value to police departments, they certainly are of some value to the general public, which deserves to know how the police forces they pay for are behaving.

Departments are willing to hold onto misconduct/shooting records for decades, but only start destroying them when it looks like they might have to share. Agencies can point to mandated retention periods all they want, but the argument doesn't wash if they're only sticklers about it when transparency is being forced on them.

Filed Under: california, destruction, foia, police records, public records, transparency

Second California Appeals Court Refuses To Review Police Unions' Challenge Of State Public Records Law

from the best-part-of-bashing-your-head-against-the-wall-is-when-you-stop dept

California law enforcement's losing streak continues. Since the new state law went into effect at the beginning of the year, California police unions have been battling the new transparency, claiming the public records law does not apply to historical records of police misconduct or use of force.

So far, the unions are finding no one who agrees with them. The law's author says the law is retroactive. So have a couple of state courts. The only person siding with unions on the retroactivity issue is the state's top cop, Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

The state's Supreme Court has turned down two requests by law enforcement unions to step in and clear up the retroactivity question. In both cases, it rejected the petition without comment. Now, a second state appellate court has refused to review a lower level decision finding the state's new law applies to old misconduct records.

Appellate judges found no reason to consider that Superior Court Judge Charles Treat's Feb. 8 decision that the state's new police transparency law, Senate Bill 1421, covered past years would be overturned on appeal and declined to hear the case. A stay on the release of records will end on March 19 unless the unions appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The unions will undoubtedly appeal. But it likely won't make any difference. The two rejections by the state Supreme Court include a petition by one of the state's sheriff's unions, which filed its petition right after the state court lifted the temporary injunction. This rejection, however, came with a comment from the appeals court -- one that indicates this will all end in tears (and released records).

"For the reasons stated by the trial court, appellants' argument is without merit," the court's order says.

The argument unions are pushing is a non-starter. At best, it's just delaying the inevitable. And the stance the state's unions are taking isn't even directly aligned with the departments whose employees they represent. Some law enforcement agencies are already turning over documents to records requesters without making them jump through litigation hoops or wait for a final call from the state's top court.

Sooner or later, the inevitable conclusion will arrive. And then agencies can get back to their usual stonewalling and foot-dragging. No matter what the courts decide on the retroactivity issue, it's still going to take some form of litigation to pry these records loose.

Filed Under: california, police, police misconduct, police unions, public records, transparency

California Attorney General Doubles Down On Threatening Journalists For Possessing Convicted Cops List

from the I-guess-the-Constitution-only-protects-bad-cops dept

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has decided there's too much First Amendment in his state. First, he ignored clarification provided directly to him by the author of the state's new public records law to declare past police misconduct records off limits. Claiming the question of retroactivity was still open, Becerra denied public records requests seeking documents created prior to January 1, 2019.

His next potshot at the First Amendment occurred shortly thereafter. Journalists from UC Berkeley received a list of convicted California police officers in response to a records request. The list covered 10 years of convictions and contained 12,000 names. At this point, the journalists have not published the full list. But they have been vetting the list to prep for publication.

That's where AG Becerra stepped in. He told the journalists it was illegal for them to possess "confidential information" they obtained lawfully through a public records request. He's wrong, of course. It is not illegal to possess documents received via public records requests even if the government entity has mistakenly sent you the wrong documents.

As for the "confidential" claim, any convictions would already be public records, seeing as prosecutions are handled by the state's court system. What the list does is provide one-stop shopping for bad cops, which is what law enforcement agencies are doing when they run applicants against this list.

So far, only three officers' names have been published. AG Becerra is trying to ensure those three names are the only ones the public will ever see. If the First Amendment needs to be damaged to protect bad cops, that's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

In a statement provided to Freedom of the Press Foundation on Wednesday, a spokesman for the California Department of Justice doubled down on the contention that the journalists are breaking the law:

“The UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program is not an entity permitted to possess or use this confidential data. The UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program chose to publish the confidential information of Californians despite being alerted by the Department of Justice that doing so was prohibited by law.”

The AG's office is still threatening the reporters with criminal charges simply for possessing the list. But even if the journalists publish the list in full, it's unlikely any court will support Becerra's decision to pretend the First Amendment doesn't exist. Both the act of requesting public records and the publication of obtained records are protected speech. AG Becerra has nothing to work with here, but he's publicly demonstrating his willingness to do whatever it takes to protect the state's bad cops.

Worse, he's doubled down. When AG Becerra was asked for clarification by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, he had this to say:

“We always strive to balance the public’s right to know, the need to be transparent and an individual’s right to privacy. In this case, information from a database that’s required by law to be confidential was released erroneously, jeopardizing personal data of individuals across our state. No one wants to shield criminal behavior; we’re subject to the rule of law.”

If Becerra has a problem with "jeopardizing personal data," the only action he should be taking is against the government entity that (supposedly) breached the law by releasing it to reporters. Becerra's nod to "rule of law" is especially rich. The Constitution is part of the "law" Becerra professes allegiance to. But it's clear he'd rather cover up for his cop buddies than respect the parts of the law that restrain his ability to punish people for protected speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, california, foia, journalism, police misconduct, public records, reporting, transparency, xavier becerra

California Legislators Want To Make It More Difficult For Records Requesters To Get Documents From The Government

from the mandated-chain-yanking dept

The California legislature handed the public a win by making police misconduct records obtainable through records requests. The transparency very few law enforcement agencies are welcoming is still being litigated, but going forward it seems clear cops will no longer be able to hide their misconduct behind a wall of government-enabled opacity.

I guess California legislators believe some sort of transparency equilibrium must be maintained. They've introduced a bill that will make it more difficult for requesters to obtain documents. (via Dave Maass) The bill amends the state's public records law to create another hoop for requesters to jump through before they can get a hold of documents the law says are rightfully theirs.

Here's the key amendment:

Before instituting any proceeding for injunctive or declarative relief or writ of mandate in any court or competent jurisdiction, the person shall meet and confer in good faith with the agency in an attempt to informally resolve each issue. The person or their attorney shall file a declaration stating that this meet and confer process has occurred at the time that proceedings are instituted.

This may seem like a minimal imposition, but it really isn't. Only a small percentage of public records requesters live close to the agencies they're seeking to obtain documents from. Even if they are nearby, the law allows agencies to set the agenda. Agencies take as long as they want to set up a meeting, pushing rejected requests past the law's upper limits for responses.

Even if agencies allow these conferences to happen by phone, requesters are still at the mercy of agencies that are in no hurry to return responses. This is just another way for agencies to stonewall requesters in hopes of deterring them from following through on their requests.

The litigation option is being delayed for no discernible purpose. Few things motivate recalcitrant government agencies like lawsuits. This is a gift to uncooperative agencies, presented as a common sense solution to the costs of litigation. Sure, in a perfect world, these discussions could head off pricey lawsuits. But the world we actually live in requires litigation a great deal of the time because few government agencies are truly responsive to records requesters.

And it's all going to end up in court anyway. The court will now have to rule first on whether a good faith effort was made prior to the filing, which will result in more expenses incurred by both parties as they attempt to persuade a judge an attempt was or wasn't made by one party. There's nothing in the law that punishes agencies for screwing around with requesters and no time limit is placed on the mandated meetings.

Hopefully, this new requirement will never make its way into law. If it does, it should be challenged immediately on the grounds that it violates rights guaranteed by the state. If state legislators are truly concerned about the ever-escalating cost of public records litigation, they should focus their time and energy cracking down on agencies with track records of unresponsiveness, rather than just make it more difficult to force records out of these agencies' hands.

Filed Under: california, public records, transparency

Georgia Gov't Employee Somehow Manages To Get Criminally Charged For Violating Public Records Laws

from the protections-for-records-requesters-no-longer-listed-as-'NIB' dept

In an event rarer than the stripping of qualified immunity from a police officer, a public official is being criminally charged for violating open records laws.

The press secretary for former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has been cited for allegedly violating the Georgia Open Records Act in the first-ever criminal complaint filed in connection with the law, the state attorney general’s office announced Monday.

Jenna Garland, 34, the press secretary during Reed’s second term, is accused of ordering a subordinate in the city’s watershed department in March 2017 to delay handing over public records that contained information damaging to Reed and other city officials. The records were requested by Channel 2 Action News.

Both misdemeanor charges are potentially worth $1,000 in fines and a year in jail, but we're probably not going to see anyone locked up for screwing the public. We've only seen one other case like this in the history of Techdirt, and there's nothing indicating any of the politicians indicted for public records law violations have been jailed for breaking the law. In fact, one felt so unthreatened by the charges, she filed for re-election while still under indictment.

In this case, a pair of records requests led to the criminal charges. The first request was for water billing records, filed by journalists at Channel 2. The second request -- filed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution(AJC) and Channel 2 -- sought communications discussing the water billing records request. The second request was a goldmine for journalists and the impetus for criminal charges against Jenna Garland.

In March 2018, the AJC and Channel 2 published text messages Garland sent a year earlier to then-watershed spokeswoman Lillian Govus.

[...]

In the messages, Garland instructed Govus to “drag this out,” “be as unhelpful as possible” and to “provide the information in the most confusing format available.”

Garland later instructed Govus to “hold all” records until a Channel 2 producer contacted Govus for an update.

The records originally sought showed large amounts owed to the city's water department by a number of city politicians, including a councilwoman attempting to run for mayor. Those records were finally released to Channel 2 after it threatened to sue the agency.

There may be more charges coming, based on what's been seen in the text messages AJC obtained. Garland didn't work alone to withhold requested documents and quite possibly was following instructions from those above her when she started telling city employees to violate open records law.

This sort of thing should be happening more frequently, but it's difficult to convince prosecutors to go after fellow government employees. The laws themselves usually aren't much help, snaring only the most egregious violators. Still, it does show it's not impossible to punish government employees for violating open records laws, which should generate at least some minimal deterrent effect.

Filed Under: criminal charges, foia, georgia, jenna garland, public records