Progress wins open records appeal
Public right to information trumps censorship
Issue date: 8/28/08 Section: Perspective
Near the end of last semester, the Progress staff got fed up with vast quantities of black ink clouding the police reports we received from the Eastern police department every week. The reports were so heavily redacted we couldn't list names in the police beat without running the risk of libeling someone.
Remedying the situation was tricky because the Progress wasn't formally requesting the reports from the university. Eastern police gave us the reports we used each week as a courtesy, which meant they could remove whatever information they desired before giving them to us. And since formal requests could take weeks to process, our only option was to take the readily available censored reports.
We had to figure out how to end the unnecessary redactions without delaying information to our readers.
In order to determine what the police department was redacting that couldn't be redacted when a formal request was made, we sent a pair of "Freedom Of Information Act" requests to the university, asking for copies of about a week's worth of police reports. When we got these reports, we were surprised to see just as much black ink on the formally requested reports as on the freebies we got from the police department. On some reports, even more information was redacted on the formally requested version.
We immediately complained to Eastern's university counsel. The university was relying on a single statute under Kentucky law that allows the redaction of "information of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
While it is a necessary and useful law for protecting innocent people from sensationalist media or prying eyes, the Progress staff felt the university was clearly misusing the statute to redact information the public had a right to see.
University counsel didn't see it our way, and in the meantime Eastern police had begun redacting even more information from their free reports, so we took the next step and appealed the university's response to our request to the Kentucky Attorney General.
Remedying the situation was tricky because the Progress wasn't formally requesting the reports from the university. Eastern police gave us the reports we used each week as a courtesy, which meant they could remove whatever information they desired before giving them to us. And since formal requests could take weeks to process, our only option was to take the readily available censored reports.
We had to figure out how to end the unnecessary redactions without delaying information to our readers.
In order to determine what the police department was redacting that couldn't be redacted when a formal request was made, we sent a pair of "Freedom Of Information Act" requests to the university, asking for copies of about a week's worth of police reports. When we got these reports, we were surprised to see just as much black ink on the formally requested reports as on the freebies we got from the police department. On some reports, even more information was redacted on the formally requested version.
We immediately complained to Eastern's university counsel. The university was relying on a single statute under Kentucky law that allows the redaction of "information of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
While it is a necessary and useful law for protecting innocent people from sensationalist media or prying eyes, the Progress staff felt the university was clearly misusing the statute to redact information the public had a right to see.
University counsel didn't see it our way, and in the meantime Eastern police had begun redacting even more information from their free reports, so we took the next step and appealed the university's response to our request to the Kentucky Attorney General.