Mayor Mike McGinn said this afternoon that the Seattle Police Department will begin publishing summaries of records released to the public, post descriptions of records the city cannot release, and try to make requesting city records easier for average citizens.
The announcement comes after the Seattle Times announced yesterday that the city will concede a $20,000 settlement for apparently failing to abide by open-records laws, in particular by releasing an internal SPD memo on the 2012 May Day protests to the daily paper. But as I mentioned yesterday in a post titled “Under McGinn, SPD’s Transparency Is a Joke,” that settlement was indicative of a larger problem: For instance, KOMO is suing the city before the state supreme court for withholding dashcam footage. Apparently seeking to quell the fallout, this afternoon McGinn issued this statement:
I expect SPD, and all government agencies, to fully comply with public disclosure laws. I support Chief Pugel’s response to the Seattle Times. As a further commitment to transparency, I am directing SPD to simplify the process for requesting public information from the department and to begin publishing summaries of completed PDR requests. I have also directed SPD to post a list of requested documents not subject to disclosure and other related public records through data.seattle.gov. The exceptions to this new policy at this time will be requests made by victims, complainants, or witnesses of crimes documented by SPD.
This is a mixed bag if you ask me—some baseline, some superficial reforms.
The first announcement—”simplify the process”—is only intended to make the SPD’s records-request web pages easier for laypeople to navigate, McGinn’s office says. That doesn’t cure the SPD’s ailment. Filing a records request has always been as simple as sending a brief e-mail asking for the documents you want. And for the most part, the people who need records—media and lawyers—already find that process simple. The problem is that the SPD drags its feet as long as it’s legally allowed to, pretends the record don’t exist, releases records in batches while withholding politically unfavorable documents until the final batch (long after the document was needed), or simply refuses to release documents it’s legally required to release. If experts confront these obstacles, only resolving them after legal confrontations, then making it easier for the general public to file requests—but without legal representation—will only add to the public’s frustration. It won’t make records more accessible to the media or lawyers who know what they want. And it will only help members of the public who know how to play the SPD’s hide-the-ball game.
The second proposals appear to be guarding the SPD’s flanks. The Seattle Times fiasco, as I understand it, resulted from the SPD promising a document that it failed to deliver in a timely manner. While publishing a list of documents the SPD has released and stating which ones it cannot release (presumably also stating the reason they can’t be released, such as being in draft form or shielded by attorney-client privilege) seems mostly to cover their asses in court. This is a pretty low bar. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t address the ailment of opacity and hostility that pervades the public records division.
If there’s hope for institutional change at SPD, it’s in interim chief Jim Pugel (who, it bears mentioning, singed off on the Seattle Times settlement). The question for Seattle is whether Pugel can forge a culture of transparency internally and communicate well with the public—two tasks at which former chief John Diaz spectacularly failed.