Transparency News, 8/17/20

“But public speaking in a free speech zone, the officer said, amounted to disorderly conduct.”

 

The Virginia State Conference of the NAACP said they want public access to records on use of force data, officer complaints and discipline, and the firing and rehiring of police officers with a history of misconduct.
WVEC

Attorneys for the Suffolk School Board will appeal the verdict handed down last month by a Suffolk Circuit Court judge who ruled the board and the majority of its members violated provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. The notice of appeal was filed in Suffolk Circuit Court Aug. 13. Though the attorneys litigating the case for the board — Ann Sullivan and Deborah Collins — did not reply to a request for comment by press time Aug. 14, board attorney Wendell Waller, in an email, cited a part of the Aug. 7 order and a bench memorandum to note what the board believes were “errors committed” during the trial, and its reasons why the court should not have awarded attorney’s fees and other costs to Story.
Suffolk News-Herald

Data for [the Pilot’s story “Failure of oversight: How dozens of officers kept their police certification despite convictions”] was compiled by searching through newspaper articles and federal and state court records. The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings was used to update The Pilot’s police shooting database, which was created by sending Freedom of Information Act requests to all of the Commonwealth Attorneys in the state. The list of decertified officers was provided by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. Spreadsheets containing data in the above graphics and links to local news stories on the various incidents involving police officers can be found here.
The Virginian-Pilot

The six judges in the Prince William County Circuit Court said in an order this week they could not preside over a lawsuit against five county supervisors. The judges asked Donald Lemons, Chief Justice of Virginia’s Supreme Court, to designate a judge from another court of record or a retired judge of any court to preside over the case.  The lawsuit alleges five supervisors held an illegal meeting May 31 when they met with police and community leaders in the wake of civil rights protests. 
InsideNoVa

Caesars Entertainment’s casino campaign committee has two elected officials serving on a body that could benefit a private company by aiding its referendum bid for casino in Danville.  But Delegate Danny Marshall, R-Danville, and Mayor Alonzo Jones, who are co-chairing the committee along with Averett University President Tiffany Franks and minority investor Tammy Wright-Warren, say they are not working for Caesars’ gain but to benefit local residents. Jones said he consulted with City Attorney Clarke Whitfield on the ethics of serving on the committee to make sure there was no conflict of interest. Whitfield told the Danville Register & Bee that Jones’ presence on the committee is “perfectly proper.”  “We concluded that as long as the mayor is not being compensated and as long as he is not speaking for City Council, it is not in any way a violation of any ethics or any state law,” Whitfield said. “It’s perfectly proper. He reached out to us before accepting it to make sure it was proper.”
Register & Bee

 

 

 

A few years ago, a college student in Georgia stood on a stool outside a campus food court to talk about his Christian faith. He spoke for 20 minutes about human frailty and the possibility of salvation when school officials told him he had to stop or face discipline. This fall, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the student, Chike Uzuegbunam, can sue the officials for violating his First Amendment rights when they enforced a particularly severe version of the school speech codes that have become commonplace at colleges and universities around the nation. Mr. Uzuegbunam had tried to comply with the rules at his school, Georgia Gwinnett College, a public institution in Lawrenceville, Ga., that sprawls over 260 acres. The college had designated two small patches of concrete as “free speech expression areas.” A campus police officer told him that he could distribute literature and have one-on-one conversations. But public speaking in a free speech zone, the officer said, amounted to disorderly conduct.
The New York Times

The threat of a lawsuit encouraged U.S. Attorney Mike Stuart to release documents showing his office spent nearly $90,000 on radio ads, including ads advocating against state-level legislation. The West Virginia Chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative free-market public advocacy group, released emails released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia. The Freedom of Information Act release was a result of a lawsuit filed by AFP last month after Stuart’s office had ignored their information requests. The emails show communication between Stuart, who was appointed as U.S. attorney by President Donald Trump, Deanne Eder, the spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and West Virginia Radio Corp., home of the MetroNews radio network.
The Journal

 

 

All too often, policy is debated by anecdote: This person or these people have had this experience. Anecdotes are powerful tools for demonstrating real-world problems, real-world impacts, but they are but one part of the story. The rest of the story lies within the records maintained by local law enforcement agencies, by state criminal justice departments, by prosecutors and courts — the whole criminal justice system. In records there is data. There are numbers of how many this, what kind of that. There are complaints and how those complaints are resolved. There are certificates, there are analyses, there are policies. Financial records are detailing who bought what and for how much. There are records when an officer is investigated. There are records when the officer is investigating a suspect. There are statistics that tell a long-range story, and there are reports about something that happened just yesterday.
Megan Rhyne, Virginia Mercury

The OSIG concluded the Parole Board did not make proper notification to the commonwealth’s attorney in Richmond, where the crime occurred. Members ducked a scheduled meeting with the family of Officer Michael Conners. And the board did not keep minutes as required by law. Not that the public could learn any of those details when the report was released. The version made public was so heavily redacted as to render it worthless — an all-too-common problem in Virginia thanks to a Freedom of Information Act riddled with excuses and exceptions. GOP leaders in the General Assembly, who seized the issue and pushed for answers, secured the release of an unredacted copy, giving the public an opportunity to review the facts for themselves. Northam has been an impediment to transparency here rather than an agent of accountability. That is to his detriment and that of the commonwealth. While managing the COVID-19 response requires much of him, Virginia needed his leadership on this. According to the Virginia Mercury, Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County, has introduced a bill to require that all board votes be made public record and Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, plans to make transparency a focal point in this week’s special legislative session. Such measures deserve broad support, as does greater scrutiny of the board’s decisions during the pandemic. Virginians deserve answers and should have the full-throated support of commonwealth officials in order to obtain it.
The Virginian-Pilot

State officials withhold information. Sound familiar? [The Parole Board] report was never made public until three senior Republicans demanded to see it, and who then — once it was turned over to them — made an unredacted copy publicly available. Let’s acknowledge right up front that there are political overtones to the Republicans’ act of transparency. But the point here is less about who released the report and why. The bigger issue is the fact that state officials didn’t release it, but rather sought to hide information from the public and shield the board from accountability. How and why inmates were chosen for parole has been a legitimate cause of public concern for months now. The state owes Virginians much more transparency about how it made those decisions — including, perhaps especially, when mistakes are at issue.
The Daily Progress