Volunteers in Tennessee recently conducted a statewide audit of how well county governments complied with public records laws.

The verdict? No so good.

The auditors sought the same four documents: the last recorded minutes of a planning commission or zoning board; two recent crime incident reports and crime logs — one each from the local sheriff and one local police department in each county; and a local school system’s latest report on the number of expulsions/suspensions for drugs, weapons and violence.

Audit organizers said these documents were chosen because they should have been readily available and because they represent the types of documents average citizens might have a reason to see.

Some auditors were questioned at length, told to come back, yelled at, forced to show their driver’s licenses and, in one county, incorrectly told that a criminal incident report was only available to the victim of that incident.

In Crockett County, sheriff’s department personnel told the auditor: ”We can’t let you see this because we don’t know you.”

A Greene County sheriff’s employee said criminal reports were private. ”We don’t let just anyone look through those,” the auditor was told. Asked whether the record was not public information, the employee replied, ”No, it’s not, not without a court order.”

In Van Buren County, a sheriff’s deputy told the auditor that ”John Q. Citizen” could not walk in and see public records.

In fact, sheriff’s departments were not receptive to having a stranger look at crime logs and/or incident reports even though some couldn’t explain how they could legally withhold them.

[...]

The 117 denials out of 356 records requested in the two-day survey by the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government indicate the struggle citizens face in seeing basic information collected by their local government.

Many departments cited HIPAA and Homeland Security as reasons for denying requests — neither of which should ever come in to play given the documents requested.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at 11:47 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.