Transparency News 5/1/15

Friday, May 1, 2015

State and Local Stories


Virginia House Republicans are fighting to keep hundreds of pages of documents secret as attorneys for Democratic groups push for full access, hoping to find something useful in an ongoing lawsuit over state election maps. The lawsuit targets 12 districts in the House of Delegates, and it follows the same argument that invalidated Virginia's 3rd Congressional District earlier this year: That the General Assembly's Republican majority focused on race as it drew maps, packing minority voters into a handful of districts and diluting their voting power in neighboring ones. The House's Republican leadership denies this, arguing as it did in the 3rd District case that the districts are constitutional. But, as in the 3rd District case, they're fighting to keep emails and other communications about the 2011 redistricting process from becoming evidence.
Daily Press

Gov. Terry McAuliffe indicated Thursday he’ll veto bills that would limit the length of time police can store data collected by license plate readers – a move that will please law enforcement but bother privacy advocates and many legislators. “They pushed this legislation way too fast,” McAuliffe said on his monthly “Ask the Governor” radio show on WRVA. “It was too rushed. It’s not a good piece of legislation.” The legislation came up last year, when lawmakers wanted to curb how long agencies could store data gathered by police. Police chiefs and sheriffs and their lobbyists persuaded the General Assembly to delay the idea for a year.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
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Public officials in Kansas can conduct public business on private e-mails without those e-mails becoming public records, Attorney General Derek Schmidt said Tuesday. Schmidt's opinion comes after The Eagle reported in January that Gov. Sam Brownback's budget director, Shawn Sullivan, had used a private e-mail address to send top administration officials and two lobbyists with ties to Brownback a draft of the state budget three weeks ahead of its public unveiling. Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, asked Schmidt in February for an opinion on whether e-mails sent by a public official from a private e-mail address on a personal electronic device are subject to the Kansas Open Records Act.
Governing

Recently, Carl Malamud and his site public.resource.org scored a victory in a long-running effort to give the public better access to data on America’s nonprofits. The IRS was trying to deny a FOIA request for form 990s filed electronically by nine tax-exempt charitable organizations, claiming that it would be too costly to release the records in the machine-readable format that was requested by public.resource.org in its original FOIA. United States District Judge William H. Orrick of California wasn’t particularly impressed with this argument, and ordered the IRS to produce the records as requested. Judge Orrick identified some pretty significant problems with the IRS’ argument.
Sunlight Foundation

The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the District to postpone its plans to provide body cameras to Metropolitan Police Department officers, challenging the mayor’s plan to keep the videos from public view. The ACLU of the Nation’s Capital says the city’s plan to spend $5.1 million to purchase 2,800 body-worn cameras for patrol officers should not occur without a mechanism for allowing the videos to be redacted and released to the public. “Police accountability is not achieved by allowing the police to police themselves,” said Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, executive director of the local chapter of the ACLU. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser included in her budget plan a blanket exemption that would prevent all footage from police body cameras from being released in response to public records requests.
Washington Times

A House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, has received 4,000 pages of documents from the State Department's official inquiry into the attack, its chairman said on Thursday. The documents are from the State Department's "Accountability Review Board" (ARB) investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012 attack that took the lives of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who heads the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement it was the first time the proceedings of a State ARB had been turned over to Congress. He did not discuss their content, but said they would aid the panel's review of the attacks. The State Department has already turned over thousands of pages of other documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was named last year. But Gowdy said Thursday he was still waiting for additional records.
Reuters

All political advertisements will soon be banned on New York public transportation following a vote on Wednesday by the board of the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, NBC4 reports. The vote came after a judge ruled that the agency could not reject a provocative advertisement attacking Muslims submitted to appear on the nation's largest public transit system by conservative activist Pamela Geller. Geller has launched legal challenges against other cities for attempting to keep her advertisements off of their trains and buses as well. Philadelphia instituted a complete ban on political ads on mass transit when a judge ruled that the agency could not reject ads from Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative that included photos of Muslim leaders meeting with Adolph Hitler and the text "Islamic Jew-Hatred: It's In the Quran." Those advertisements have made it onto public transit elsewhere, running for a month on buses in Washington, DC in 2014.
Slate

The unrest in Baltimore and other cities regarding alleged police misconduct has prompted new calls for law enforcement officers to wear body cameras. Such recordings could provide accountability and transparency in potentially controversial circumstances. At least, that's the idea. But the recent controversies and scandals also have introduced questions about how often officers' stories line up with what's on video. The Oakland Police Department has been using body cameras since 2010, and they've had an impact — cases of use-of-force and citizen complaints are both down, says Police Chief Sean Whent. But have officers' reports fit what their cameras have recorded? "Our experience has been that the evidence has largely supported the actions of the police officers, in showing that they were in fact behaving appropriately," Whent says. Whent has been at the State Capitol in Sacramento a lot lately, testifying on behalf of a hotly contested proposed law that would have prevented police officers — in cases where force was used — from reviewing their own recordings before giving a statement.
NPR


Editorials/Columns

The scarcity of voting records is still a problem, particularly on the House side. Such record keeping is not required by Virginia law, but why would responsible legislators content themselves with meeting the minimum standard of transparency? And we agree that the governor's penchant for using the so-called "working papers" exemption of the Freedom of Information Act borders on abuse. It's an approach shared by too many city managers, county administrators and university presidents. It is further evidence that the ongoing review of that law should cut some of the 170 exemptions in the state FOIA, so there are fewer places for officials to cower from public scrutiny. A good place to start is that badly abused "working papers" clause that lets so many Virginia officials hide what they've done. We reject any allegation that the report is a hit-piece meant to embarrass Republican lawmakers. Access and accountability are — or should be — non-partisan principles. And we would condemn any lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, who conceals information from the public or discourages a more thorough understanding of government.
Daily Press

Tea party patriots, Main Street Republicans and Democrats in Virginia have found something they can all agree on—public school budgets should be presented so residents can understand them, and the documents should be available online. Without fanfare, a Senate bill to make school budgets more transparent, understandable and available unanimously passed both houses of the General Assembly this year. SB 1286 was recently signed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe. This is good news for taxpayers and supporters of public schools who want accountability. After all, the transfer of local tax dollars to the schools represents the largest single expenditure in every county and city budget in the state. The school board budgeting bill was submitted at the request of the Henrico County Tea Party by state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican who locally represents Caroline County and parts of Spotsylvania, King George and Westmoreland counties.
Free Lance-Star

Body cameras also will protect the police who wear them. Reasonable people have little doubt that police work is dangerous, that suspects sometimes turn dangerously violent and that the vast majority of police officers have no desire to hurt, much less kill, the suspects they encounter. Video footage taken while police officers are engaged in their work has the potential to exonerate honest, conscientious officers who are falsely accused of committing brutal acts in the course of their duties. But the video captured by Suffolk’s body cameras will do little to assuage the police department’s critics if it’s not routinely released to the public. If the department routinely hides behind claims of investigative privilege when it comes to releasing body camera video, the public will have little confidence in the program when the department chooses to release video purporting to exonerate officers.
Suffolk News-Herald