Public Records

Government FOIA requesters are being counter-sued for asking for information could embarrass the agency or it is claimed to be legally sensitive. [...]

Miami-Dade County’s State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle is censoring at least 100 of her critics on Twitter, including a dozen accounts either named Darren Rainey or with the deceased man’s profile image.
We have pictures to prove it.
It all started when the prosecutor sent a tweet about freedom.

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.

It may sound crazy to someone who doesn’t regularly participate in the decision-making process of the government that people like me would feel the need to be informed about what government officials are doing in our name and at our expense.
Those of us who actively participate in the process are generally labeled by public officials and their supporters as being disruptive; unruly troublemakers hell bent on tearing the community apart. It’s a common attitude that people like myself face and it scares away many people who may be interested in what the government is doing.

An Ohio sheriff’s sergeant thought it was all fun and games when she and fellow deputies deleted video footage that showed her pepper spraying a women strapped down in a restraint chair.
But now the joke is on her because the video still exists, resulting in a lawsuit against Montgomery County Sheriff Sergeant Judith Sealey and her cohorts.

Like most politicians, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine campaigned on a platform of promising better transparency to his constituents.
And like most politicians, he proved to be a liar.
But unlike most politicians, he is being sued over his broken promise.
The lawsuit, which you can read here, was filed by Photography is Not a Crime’s very own Grant Stern.

On May 7, 2014, Anthony Ferrier was viciously beaten by a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police detective inside a subway station in Boston, and the entire incident was captured by one of the agency’s surveillance cameras—but the public wouldn’t know the truth for nearly a year.

The Amherst Police Department in Massachusetts has refused to comply with a public records request from PINAC that asked for the internal affairs records for two police officers who were named in a civil rights lawsuit this month.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer

For the first time in more than a year, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office has been prompted to take action against government officials who have violated the state’s public records law.
That’s good news, but it’s also the latest reminder that Massachusetts state officials treat transparency as a joke.

North Carolina’s Governor Pat McCrory just signed into law an act making police body camera video an official state secret. Naturally, following the events of last week, civil rights and transparency advocates are in an uproar.