(I’m bumping this up just in case some of you missed it yesterday)
On Friday, my former Stranger colleague Dominic Holden wrote a blustery editorial on the police department’s move to put incident reports online, making them more accessible to the general public, but reducing the overall number of reports available without needing to file public disclosure requests or asking the media unit really nicely.
The crux of Dominic’s argument is as follows:
[T]he Seattle Police Department is restricting media access to most of the incident reports that used to be available at precinct headquarters. Getting the remaining police records will now require records requests that could take up to a month or more to fulfill, and could cost media outlets around $50 per day.
Reports used to be kept at precincts on CDs—which contained about 60 to 100 reports per day—and the new system lives entirely online. But of those online records, only about 15 reports were provided per day on average this week, about a quarter of the records previously available.
[...]
There is also a cost. After the first 20 pages, records cost 15 cents each. Reports average four to six pages each [.] So if there are 80 reports in a day (about 400 pages), paying the fee for the reports would cost $57.75.
To be clear, we are not necessarily talking about huge cases (although it’s unclear what cases could be omitted). But we are talking about a obscurity of police records, some of which may not fall under the categories posted online but have significance nonetheless. Creating a major obstacle for the media obtaining those records—and thereby an obstacle for the public learning about police activity—is problematic.
While I, like Domonic, have some issues with SPD’s new report retrieval system, it’s time for a reality check.
First off, Dominic is being a disingenuous alarmist when he says SPD is “restricting access” to police reports.
Here at Seattlecrime.com, we’ve been tracking and storing police reports since we came online on October 28th. While SPD’s only had one full month of online report output, it doesn’t look like there’s been a significant drop-off in reports. In fact, the numbers seem to have stabilized a bit.
November - 173
December – 186
January – 157
February – 230
March - 257
*April – 248
May – 241
June (to date) – 49
* The department began beta testing their site on April 26th
While these aren’t official numbers on how many reports SPD has released, they should give you a pretty good idea of how many reports have been made available over the last eight months
While SPD may be narrowing the types of reports they’re releasing—which I’ll get to in a second—the new system should, hypothetically, be vastly more reliable than the old one. And, most importantly, they’re making that information more widely accessible.
With the old reporting system, SPD’s public records office would redact copies of some reports, and then burn them to CDs. Then it would be up to officers at each of the five precincts to pick them up at the department’s headquarters downtown, which was a bit of a crapshoot.
Not only were a good portion of the reports fairly useless and mundane—really minor shoplifting cases, car prowl reports, and boring neighbor disputes over property lines regularly made appearances—but, at best, you could usually expect new reports to be available every other day. Sometimes we’d sometimes go 4-5-6-7 days with no new reports.
On top of that, you had the hassle of having to actually go to the precinct, and deal with some very unpleasant desk officers (this means you, Danny Allen) who were at times reluctant to give up report CDs (aka public documents) to reporters. I can only imagine how much more difficult it would’ve been to try to get the reports as a “civilian.”
Unfortunately, Dominic—who has never covered the cops beat and consequently not done much report digging either—is coming at this without any of that context.
Now, Dominic’s other main concern seems to be about the types of reports the department is releasing.
SPD has said that for now, they’ll only be releasing reports for burglaries, assaults, homicides, and robberies.
With that, SPD won’t be releasing reports for sexual assaults, drug busts, thefts, car prowls, or prostitution stings. Those are important pieces of information that show what’s happening in Seattle’s neighborhoods.
For instance, having information on drug arrests in the East Precinct numbers would be especially useful right now in determining whether the drug dealers really are coming back to 23rd Avenue.
That said, while these reports are incredibly useful and crime data allows us to keep you aware of crime trends, this ultimately isn’t an issue of transparency.
It’s not like SPD has altogether stopped reporting data on sexual assaults and auto thefts. While they’re about two months behind at this point, SPD still releases monthly citywide and precinct-specific crime data.
I’m by no means trying to give SPD a pass on the limitations of their system. But ultimately, if it’s truly about open access, then this was the right move. It should be just as easy for “civilians” to get the same public documents as reporters. That’s what this does.
Now, you can get the reports from the same place we do—although we try to save you the trouble with our handy crime map—and file the same public disclosure requests we do if you want more info.
Everybody gets the same on-the-books info.
Should SPD figure out a way in the next few months to release more reports? Absolutely. They should be able to automate much of the redaction they do. However, something as minor as a misspelled name could mean someone’s private information ends up posted on SPD’s website. When you’re dealing with sensitive info like the home address of an abused child, or name of a rape victim, I’m fine with SPD starting off slow and making sure they’ve got everything working properly.
Finally, Dominic claims that this will create a “major obstacle” for media outlets, who will be forced to cough up hundreds of dollars to get a full picture of what’s going on in the department.
False.
Will this make our jobs a bit harder? Maybe. But those of us that have been doing this for awhile—namely myself, Casey McNerthney, Scott Guttierez, Levi Pullkinen, Mike Carter, Jen Sullivan, Sara Jean Green, Christine Clarridge, and Steve Miletich—don’t rely on police reports anyways. We have sources in the department, in the courts, in neighborhoods, in gangs, and in a billion other dark, weird places. That’s what we do. We’re not going to miss the big stories.
Ultimately, this isn’t about whether or not reports are going to be tougher for reporters to get. It’s about making public documents public. They haven’t been that way in a long time. This is a good first step.
