The city is facing a 60 million dollar defecit and a shortage of police officers and Charles Mudede is against the department saving hundreds of labor hours because it makes his once a month, mildly stimulating column a little more difficult to write. Kind of absurd if you ask me. Try the sheriff dept., maybe they will hire someone to hand deliver all of the "interesting" reports right to your desk, taking all the work out of it completely. The county seems pretty able and willing to waste dollar after dollar.

I'm all for transparency, but the chief is right. I've had to redact documents, and it's a tedious, frought business. If Muede is willing to put in the work, maybe he could volunteer to redact all those documents himself as a volunteer. Or is his commitment to transparency only paper thin?

midlander and thursdaydynamo have their priorities all fucked up. The solution to budget cuts is to cut transparency? How about cutting back on the drug war, or the investment in unnecessarily militaristic police equipment, or--gasp--even a reduction of the number of police on the street in general?

There was just an incident today in which a Seattle police officer was caught on tape punching a woman he was arresting in the face. No matter the budget, keeping tabs on what police do, in every incident, for every call, is of incredibly importance to the maintenance of our societal dignity. Every arrest is a story, and the sum of those stories is more than the individual parts.

It's hogwash that redactions take so much time. In the past few years SPD has changed its report format so that most of the pages just contain duplicate information. It's a waste of taxpayer money to use up so many resources just to repeat the same information over and over throughout the report. They could easily just redact the one or two pages containing the original information and let the reporter or public request the remaining pages in the report if they want to see all the duplications.