Ferguson Demands High Fees To Turn Over City Files

WASHINGTON (AP) — Bureaucrats in Ferguson, Missouri, respond­ing to requests under the state’s Sunshine Act to turn over gov­ern­ment files about the fatal shoot­ing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, are charg­ing near­ly 10 times the cost of some of their own employ­ees’ salaries before they will agree to release any records. The move dis­cour­ages jour­nal­ists and civ­il rights groups from inves­ti­gat­ing the shoot­ing and its after­math. The city has demand­ed high fees to pro­duce copies of records that, under Missouri law, it could give away free if it deter­mined the mate­r­i­al was in the pub­lic’s inter­est to see. Instead, in some cas­es, the city has demand­ed high fees with lit­tle expla­na­tion or cost break­down. It billed The Associated Press $135 an hour — for near­ly a day’s work — mere­ly to retrieve a hand­ful of email accounts since the shooting.

That fee com­pares with an entry-lev­el, hourly salary of $13.90 in the city clerk’s office, and it did­n’t include costs to review the emails or release them. The AP has not paid for the search. Price-goug­ing for gov­ern­ment files is one way that local, state and fed­er­al agen­cies have respond­ed to requests for poten­tial­ly embar­rass­ing infor­ma­tion they may not want released. Open records laws are designed to give the pub­lic access to gov­ern­ment records at lit­tle or no cost, and have his­tor­i­cal­ly exposed waste, wrong­do­ing and cor­rup­tion. “The first line of defense is to make the requester go away,” said Rick Blum, who coor­di­nates the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coali­tion of media groups that advo­cates for open gov­ern­ment. “Charging exor­bi­tant fees to sim­ply cut and paste is a pop­u­lar tac­tic.” Since Brown’s death and ensu­ing protests, news orga­ni­za­tions, non­prof­it groups and every­day cit­i­zens have sub­mit­ted records requests to Ferguson offi­cials, ask­ing for police reports, records about Brown and the per­son­nel files of Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Brown Aug. 9. Organizations like the web­site Buzzfeed were told they’d have to pay unspec­i­fied thou­sands of dol­lars for emails and mem­os about Ferguson’s traf­fic-cita­tion poli­cies and changes to local elec­tions. The Washington Post said Ferguson want­ed no less than $200 for its requests.

A city spokes­woman referred inquiries about pub­lic records requests to the city’s attor­ney, Stephanie Karr, who declined to respond to repeat­ed inter­view requests from the AP since ear­li­er this month. Some states pro­vide pub­lic records for free or lit­tle cost, while oth­ers like Missouri can require fees that “result in the low­est charges for search, research and dupli­ca­tion.” The AP asked for a fee waiv­er because it argued the records would serve the pub­lic inter­est, as the law allows, but that request was denied. A spokesman for Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon referred ques­tions about the high fees to the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al, who han­dles free­dom-of-infor­ma­tion com­plaints. A spokes­woman for his office said none had been filed on the issue. In late August, the AP asked Ferguson offi­cials for copies of sev­er­al police offi­cials’ emails and text mes­sages, includ­ing those belong­ing to Wilson and Chief Thomas Jackson. The AP sought those records to reveal the city’s behind-the-scenes response to the shoot­ing and pub­lic protests. Ferguson told the AP it want­ed near­ly $2,000 to pay a con­sult­ing firm for up to 16 hours of work to retrieve mes­sages on its own email sys­tem, a prac­tice that infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy experts call unnec­es­sary. The firm, St. Louis-based Acumen Consulting, would­n’t com­ment specif­i­cal­ly on Ferguson’s con­tract, but said the search could be more com­pli­cat­ed and require tech­ni­cians to exam­ine tape back­ups. The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri filed a pub­lic records law­suit days after the shoot­ing for Brown-relat­ed police reports, but ulti­mate­ly received a cen­sored report that omit­ted offi­cers’ names and oth­er details usu­al­ly released in such doc­u­ments. Jonathan Groves, pres­i­dent of the Missouri Sunshine Coalition and a for­mer dai­ly jour­nal­ist, said that while pub­lic agen­cies can legal­ly charge rea­son­able fees for records, an unfet­tered Sunshine Law is nonethe­less an impor­tant tool “so that we have faith in what the gov­ern­ment is doing.” Read more here : http://​www​.huff​in​g​ton​post​.com/​2​0​1​4​/​0​9​/​2​9​/​f​e​r​g​u​s​o​n​-​c​i​t​y​-​f​i​l​e​s​_​n​_​5​8​9​9​3​8​8​.​h​tml