The silence from City Hall

by David Forbes April 9, 2015

Once again, an important request for public records faces lengthy, unexplained delays from the city of Asheville. It’s time for this disturbing pattern to end

Above: City Hall, file photo by Max Cooper.

Update: The city of Asheville does track records of police complaints in annual internal affairs audits. On Friday, April 10, at 4:16 p.m., city staff provided these reports for 2012 and 2013. The 2014 audit was turned over Tuesday, April 15.

On Monday, April 20, Carolina Public Press released a report detailing what the 2012-14 reports reveal about complaints about the APD.

On March 10, as part of an investigation with Carolina Public Press into the quantity of complaints about local law enforcement, I asked both the city of Asheville and the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office for the numbers of formal complaints about their officers and employees over the last few years.

The conduct of law enforcement is in the spotlight nationally and the Asheville Police Department in particular has had no shortage of controversies and turmoil in recent years. Given that, and given CPP’s laudable commitment to open government, we figured this is an important topic to inform the public about. Have the numbers of complaints gone up or down? What’s the process for filing a complaint and how are they investigated? Such information is particularly vital in light of the public debates going on.

To their credit, the Sheriff’s Office replied quickly, providing the numbers of complaints from 2010-14 on March 13.

But after multiple follow-ups, I’m still waiting on the city of Asheville to turn over the records or give a firm answer if they even exist. Nearly a month later, city staff have proven unable or unwilling to fulfill this simple request, so I have no idea how many complaints were made about the conduct of APD officers and employees in recent years. Nor, sadly, can I inform Asheville’s citizens if their government even keeps track of how many such complaints are coming in.

This topic isn’t some mysterious gray area in state open records law that requires some special consideration: as the response of the Sheriff’s Office indicates, it’s pretty straightforward. The records of individual complaints about APD officers are almost always closed due to the state’s personnel laws, though details do occasionally surface in public, as I detail in the Public Press story.

But if local governments keep tallies of the number of complaints they receive that’s a matter of public record and they have to reveal it. If they don’t track such numbers — something which is left at the discretion of local government — then that’s also important for the public to know.

It hasn’t always been this way. At a presentation during the 2012 Open Data Day I publicly praised Dawa Hitch, the city’s communications director, and the APD for making considerable improvements in the way they handled public records requests in the time I’d been a reporter. I had a few criticisms too, but on the whole things were looking up at the time.

Sadly, that’s changed sharply over the course of the past year. If the delay on turning over the police complaint numbers were the only time this had happened recently, I’d be willing to write it off as a fluke or exception. It’s not.

Trying to obtain basic information about the APD’s downtown unit last summer — for a collaborative piece with Ashvegas — took 17 days and three follow-up requests.

Late last year, obtaining basic pay information about the city’s “temporary/seasonal” workers, many of whom are paid well below the living wage municipal employees are generally supposed to make, took 49 days. Obtaining a single brief email exchange between City manager Gary Jackson and Council member Gordon Smith on the same topic took 75 days.

During the same time the median time to answer a records request, according to the city, was just two days.

For the sake of better informing the public, I recently compiled a list of records requests stretching back the Blade’s launch last year. Plenty of those were answered in a few days, or even the same day. That’s great, and I’m always happy when that happens. I’ll continue to update that list periodically, including requests that are answered quickly as well as these more vexing ones. But the vexing ones are important, in these cases covering important and controversial matters like worker pay and the state of law enforcement.

I started covering city government nearly a decade ago, so I’ve seen records requests play out many times. The requests at question here — or in the other cases I mentioned — aren’t particularly complicated or time-consuming. When I’ve requested, for example, all the emails pertaining to the city’s dealings with Occupy Asheville, I expected such a request to take awhile even if every city staffer involved was doing their absolute best. A single email exchange, a basic listing of some employees or a simple tally of complaint numbers, by contrast, shouldn’t be difficult to obtain if the city’s properly upholding its duty of turning those records over to the public promptly.

What always worries me when this happens is what we’re not hearing about. Journalists have experience and training pursuing government records and (in my case thanks to the Blade’s subscribers), get paid to do so. Journalists have the time and knowledge to make repeated phone calls, send emails and follow up until something’s obtained. We also, frankly, have the public platforms to make sure people know when officials drag their feet or refuse a request. Many in our city, many affected every day by how our government does or doesn’t work, don’t have those luxuries. If the press can’t get ahold of important records, it doesn’t bode well for the general public.

It’s not clear who or what within the city’s bureaucracy is to blame for this: there’s not enough information to make a firm conclusion. But the result is crystal clear: this delay on making important, basic public records open to the people is inexcusable, and needs to end now.

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