When Philadelphia Mayor Kenney signed an executive order in August to post online civilian complaints against Philadelphia police officers, he touted it as a “commonsense reform” that would build trust between the Police Department and the communities it serves. “This data will show residents in an easily accessible, online format how the city handles complaints against police officers,” Kenney said in a statement. Just don’t ask which police officers. As it turns out, the policy reversed a decades-old practice by the city that treated closed investigations as public records, complete with the names of officers and the citizens who filed the complaints. The Kenney administration, in consultation with police brass, inserted language into the executive order to remove those names, among other information. Officers who are subjects of the complaints are identified only by first and last initials, or sometimes only first initials. Other officers are anonymous.
Philadelphia Inquirer
When Chicago City Councilman James Cappleman took office in 2011, his staff almost immediately ran into a problem: constituent communication. It wasn’t an issue of inexperience. Tressa Feher, Cappleman’s chief of staff, had years of experience connecting politicians with their constituents, both in Washington, D.C., and at the Illinois state Capitol in Springfield. The problem was volume. “The ways the constituents get in touch with government has exploded,” says Seneca marketing director Maggie Henry.
Governing
Colorado Rep. Polly Lawrence is trying once again to make the administrative records of Colorado’s judicial branch subject to the Colorado Open Records Act. House Bill 18-1152, introduced earlier this week, is the Roxborough Park Republican’s third consecutive attempt to cover the judiciary under CORA. That doesn’t include her 2015 proposal to make the state public defender’s office comply with the public records law. “I just think that co-equal branches of government should be held to the same standards as much as possible,” Lawrence told the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. It makes people “uncomfortable,” she said, to hear that the judiciary is not bound by the same public records law as Colorado’s legislative and executive branches. “The people who pay for everything – the citizens of Colorado – should have access to more information about their government rather than less,” Lawrence said.
Pagosa Daily Post
The National Archives said last week that it will gather tens of millions of pages of classified historical records from Presidential Libraries around the country and will bring them to Washington, DC for declassification review. “We are making this change to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the safeguarding and the declassification of this material and in light of resource challenges,” said NARA chief operating officer William J. Bosanko. “Researchers are expected to benefit from efficiencies we can gain in the declassification process.” “It is important to stress that this change in physical location of the records is temporary and that the records will be returned to the Presidential Libraries as they are declassified,” he wrote in a March 1 message.
Secrecy News
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 March 16, 2018
Virginia Credit Union House
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“Executive Director Stewart Petoe told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the forms would be made public “six weeks after the ending of the filing period, as stated in Virginia Code Section 30-110.” However, the very section he cites says something different.”