Open Records Project

The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.

A Missouri police association filed a lawsuit against the city of Columbia, accusing its police department of violating the state’s public records law by refusing to provide records in a timely manner, then charging an exorbitant amount for the requested records.
Last summer, the Columbia Police Officers’ Association requested two months worth of email correspondence between Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton and Deputy Chief of Police Jill Schlude.

A pair of women making a public records request inside a Los Angeles police station made officers fear for their lives because they were recording the interaction with a camera.
After all, expressed one officer, the camera could have been a gun.
“What kid of camera looks like a weapon?” asked one of the women.
“You ain’t been out there on these streets,” the cop responded, trying to pass himself off as a grizzled tough guy who comes under regular fire from cameras.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer
“It is shameful that this is happening in such a progressive state like Massachusetts, which is supposed to value transparency and freedom of information. I believe that nothing short of the threat of legal charges will convince the media relations department of the Boston police to do their jobs. Please do your part to make this happen.”

The City of Miami Beach just asked the Miami Herald for almost $73,000 to hire one of their employees for a year, just to deliver public records documents related to “human-source fecal marker” and water quality.

Maxine Trahan, longtime public information officer for the Acadia Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana, was charged Friday with the theft of public funds in excess of $25,000 – six months after Photography is Not a Crime began a public records investigation into allegations against the media spokeswoman.
Trahan, who has worked for the department for more than ten years, is accused of failing to deposit cash seized from citizens into the department’s bank account, pocketing the money instead.
According to the arrest warrant, the thefts date back to 2010.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — When the editor of a gay-oriented newspaper in Florida requested records that he thought should be public, he cast a wide net, asking that the police emails of every employee of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office be searched for specific gay slurs over a five-month period.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer
It’s Sunshine Week, the annual national initiative to promote open government and access to public records. Meteorologists have predicted rain and clouds across Massachusetts for the next several days—and the outlook for transparency in the Bay State is equally bleak.

Co-authored with PINAC writer Andrew Quemere
For a year and a half, the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts has cited dubious and flat-out false reasons to deny a resident access to a police report she made about her neighbor urinating in public. In spite of the police department’s best efforts to block the request, however, we obtained a copy through unofficial means and are publishing it.

As addressed in my recent article, the Florida League of Cities is pushing for a dramatic and unwarranted change to Florida’s Public Records Act for which no empirical justification is offered.