Tag: Public Records

Courts, Police, public disclosure

SPD’s Obstructive “Grouping” Policy “Violates the Public Records Act,” Judge Rules

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian ruled on Monday that the Seattle Police Department routinely “violates the PRA”—the state Public Records Act—by refusing to work on more than one public disclosure request by the same requester at a time.

The ruling was a partial win by the Seattle Times, which sued SPD after the department slow-walked reporter Mike Carter’s requests by Times by choosing to respond to a single request while providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates the other six. As they have done with all but one of PubliCola’s outstanding records requests, SPD bumped this generic December 31 date forward a year at the end of each year without doing any work on any of the “inactive” requests or providing an actual date when records would be available.

In 2023, SPD signed a pre-litigation agreement with the Times in which they committed to stop grouping multiple requests that were more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement applied broadly to all requesters, SPD later told PubliCola that it only applied to the Times, and decided it applied to as few as two requests made by any requester, including the Seattle Times, over any period of time—so that, for example, a person who filed two requests over two years could have their second request placed in inactive status indefinitely with no actual estimate date for disclosure, which is required by law.

At a hearing at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent last Friday, SPD’s outside attorney, Jessica Goldman, argued that SPD is “inherently different” than an agency at a smaller city, because they get thousands of requests; for that reason, “we’re not going to make requesters happy sometimes. And I want to say on behalf of the Seattle Police Department that every single one of them wishes they could they had more resources and could provide responsive records the day they’re requested. Who doesn’t? This is not an issue of trying to hide the ball.”

By making five records requests in one day, Goldman added, Carter was “gaming the system”—asking for too many things at once to cause “excessive interference with [the] agency’s functions” and make it harder for them to respond to other requesters. As we’ve reported, SPD’s media relations office frequently directs reporters to file records requests for extremely basic information, such as a full police report or a person’s Outlook schedule, the subject of one of Carter’s long-delayed requests.

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The Times’ attorney, Kathy George, countered that SPD can’t simply complain that it has too many records requests. “And this notion that somehow, if you actually process every request when it comes in, that’s harmful, that’s backwards. It’s not harmful to actually fulfill your duties under the PRA—it’s exactly what the PRA requires.”

One fact that came out in discovery is that SPD’s public records office does treat media requests differently than other requests, by assigning them to “analysts” with lower records production requirements, rather than the “assistants” to whom non-media records requests are assigned. This raises the possibility that media requests get answers more slowly because they’re assigned to people who move through records requests at half the pace of lower-level public records employees, an especially troubling possibility if public records officers are also giving preferential treatment to “friendly” media, as the Times’ lawsuit alleges.

Judge Widian wrote that SPD’s defense of its “grouping” policy—that “because the requests are all grouped together …  providing installment updates as to one request fulfills SPD’s obligation to provide reasonable installment estimates as to all the other requests it has declared ‘inactive’—is a novel argument that has not been endorsed by the PRA or caselaw.” In other words, SPD can’t just pick one request to work on, ignore all the others, and fail to give real estimates of when the others will be fulfilled.

But the judge declined to overturn the 2017 administrative rule, adopted at the behest of then-mayor Ed Murray, that allows grouping in the first place, saying that was something the city would have to determine on its own.

Nor did she determine SPD showed preferential treatment to KOMO, a TV station owned by the conservative Sinclair network, when it quickly provided a KOMO reporter with travel records for former police chief Adrian Diaz and his chief of staff Jamie Tompkins within a month after failing to provide the same records to Carter for nearly two years. Whether SPD showed favoritism to KOMO and deliberately ignored the Times, and when SPD must change its public records practices, is still on the table.

PubliCola was unable to find the original hearing or rationale for the administrative rule that allowed city agencies to “group” multiple records in the first place, but the language of the rule itself makes clear that it was intended to address bots, DDoS attacks, malware, and malicious “extraordinary requests,” none of which apply to the media requests SPD has been de facto denying.

Mayor Katie Wilson has the unilateral authority to repeal the “grouping” rule through an administrative rulemaking process that requires a public hearing but no legislation.

Mayor Wilson, Media, Opinion, Police, public disclosure

Mayor Wilson: Audit SPD’s Public Disclosure Office!
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.

SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.

Erica C. Barnett

It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.

The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”

For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise.  Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.

Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).

In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.

Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.

As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. …  Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”

I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.

If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.

The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.

Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.

 

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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.

SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.

That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.

SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.

Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.

In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)

Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.

Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.

This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.

The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.

SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.

But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.

An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays
Photo by Derek Simeone, via Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Officers Guild has filed a lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department over its practice of “grouping” multiple public disclosure requests from a single requester and responding to them one at a time, a policy that allows SPD to sit on more recent requests for years while slowly fulfilling older ones.

The lawsuit stems from nine requests SPOG filed between 2020 and 2025; the oldest, from March 11, 2020, is more than five years old. SPOG is asking the police department to hand over the records and pay its attorney fees.

“Our biggest gripe,” SPOG president Mike Solan said, is that SPD has determined that SPOG is a “high user” of the system, “and therefore it will take too long to process [our requests.] And for us, when we see other entities granted what appear to be really quick turnoarounds, in terms of days, if not a week, when we’ve got yearslong requests that are not being granted, there’s something not right with the system in terms of being fair and balanced.”

Earlier this year, the Seattle Times sued SPD on similar grounds, alleging that SPD was failing to follow the terms of its earlier settlement over the grouping issue. In that settlement, SPD explicitly agreed not to group records requests made more than eight weeks apart—not just for the Seattle Times, but for everyone.

The records SPOG is seeking range from videos of what the lawsuit refers to as the 2020 protests, which the lawsuit refers to as “riots,” as well as records about officers’ job assignments; the city’s decision in early 2020 to reconstitute its encampment removal team, which had included police; and documents related to the city’s adoption of Workday, a new payroll system that has issued inaccurate paychecks to many city employees, including police.

“When applying the Grouping Policy, SPD processes only one grouped request at a time, placing the others on hold as if the PRA obligations are suspended,” SPOG’s lawsuit says. “This practice adds lengthy delays to an already slow process for obtaining SPD records, and signals to the requester that any additional requests will be futile.”

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SPD’s public disclosure division allows requesters to pick a single request for a public disclosure officer to answer, in its entirety, before starting on the second request on the list. “In other words,” the lawsuit says, “the City deliberately creates a circumstance where a requestor is required to acquiesce to the City’s improper Grouping Policy in order to supposedly enable the City to process a request that is more important to the requestor.

As we’ve reported previously, PubliCola currently has nine requests stuck in the grouping process, with SPD working on just one request. At SPD’s current rate of progress, we don’t expect answers to most of our requests for many years, if ever, and have more or less stopped filing requests. By creating a policy that allows SPD’s legal department to delay records requests indefinitely SPD has effectively overturned the state Public Disclosure Act for anyone else who files multiple records requests.

Several years ago, compounding this problem for members of the press, SPD’s media relations department began responding to basic media questions by telling (certain) reporters to file a records request—knowing full well, based on experience, that filing a request was about as effective than screaming into a hole in the ground. (The media folks got better once Sue Rahr replaced Adrian Diaz as interim chief a year ago; the public disclosure response team, which is part of SPD’s legal division, did not.).

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office filed a terse response to the lawsuit that denied the allegations but did not go into detail about why they believe SPD is in the right. Davison’s office declined to comment.

“We hope that this lawsuit will illustrate our concerns with [SPD] not following the rules,” Solan said. “I think that is a fair thing to ask: Change the policy and grant us our public disclosure requests.”

 

Police, public disclosure

SPD Is Still Delaying Public Disclosure by “Grouping” Records Requests, In Defiance of 2023 Settlement

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department informed PubliCola last week that it will be “grouping” all of PubliCola’s 12 open, but unrelated, public records requests into a single request and answering each of them in chronological order, rather than working on more than one of our requests at one time, which had been standard practice. All of our other requests have been pushed out, “as a placeholder date,” until December 31, 2025.

According to the form response SPD’s public disclosure office attached to all of our outstanding requests, the office can use its “discretion to group multiple requests received from the same requester or similar requests from multiple requesters and to process the requests together as a group.”

The effect of this decision will be to slow down our requests, placing the most recent ones at the back of a very long queue—discouraging PubliCola from filing additional requests and giving SPD an incentive to hold requests open longer than necessary, further delaying access to public information. We may finally get records we asked for months or years in the past, but requests we filed this month won’t see the light of day until every other request we’ve ever filed is complete.

SPD’s decision to group all our requests into a single pile is a clear violation of an agreement reached with the Seattle Times last year, which applies to all records requests, not just the Times’. Under that agreement, SPD agreed that it would not lump requests together if they are more than eight weeks apart. Our open requests do include three sets of requests that are within eight weeks of each other, plus six that are not; the requests span more than two years, October 2022 to November 2024.

According to the settlement with the Times—which the paper covered under the headline, “SPD agrees to improve public disclosure”—the city agreed that the “Seattle Police Department (SPD) will modify its [grouping policy] to preclude administrative grouping of requests that are submitted by the same requester more than eight (8) weeks apart from each other.” Prior to the settlement, the Times reported, police would “at times delay releasing records for years, well beyond the period of time it actually took to process a given request”—precisely the problem PubliCola is facing now.

SPD’s public disclosure officer did give us the opportunity re-order the 12 requests, but did not agree to work on more than one of them at a time.

In a statement, an SPD spokesman said SPD groups requests like PubliCola’s in order to “allocate resources efficiently and fairly, to provide fullest assistance to all requestors, and to process requests in a manner that allows the greatest number of requests from the greatest number of requestors to be processed, without prioritizing or deprioritizing any one requestor.”

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SPD has “more than quadrupled the size of the public disclosure unit since 2016,” the spokesman said, but there is still a backlog of almost 4,000 requests. SPD has used this backlog as a reason for delays for many years, and has appended a note about the backlog to its form response to records requests since at least 2018. In any case, SPD is required to follow the law, and abide by legally binding settlement agreements, regardless of workload.

The “grouping” policy, adopted under former mayor Ed Murray, was supposedly designed to reduce delays for public records requesters by allowing public disclosure staff to work on requests from more people at once. In practice, it leads to delays so long that the information is often outdated, sometimes by years, by the time it shows up in a reporter’s inbox.

PubliCola reached Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, which signed the agreement with the Seattle Times, to ask if SPD and the City Attorney’s Office have a difference of opinion about whether SPD has to abide by the settlement, and whether the city attorney considered them to be violating it by continuing to group (and delay) records requests. A spokesman for Davison responded by telling us the city attorney does not give legal advice to media (obviously, we didn’t ask for legal advice) and said any information about their position on the settlement was subject to attorney-client privilege.

Getting information from SPD through official channels, never easy, became extraordinarily difficult in recent years. Under its former director John O’Neil, SPD’s communications office routinely responded to simple questions and requests for information by telling PubliCola to file a records request—a departure from past practice that has made it impossible, practically speaking, to get things like police reports and 911 calls in a timely fashion.

The SPD spokesman said the media relations office will do its best to answer questions in the future, and there have been noticeable improvements. But that doesn’t address the potentially years-long waits we currently face for our outstanding requests, a pile that has continued to grow because our reporting hasn’t stopped just because the department has told us, in effect, that filing records requests is pointless.

SPD’s delay tactics have had real consequences, though. Many of our requests have become significantly less timely over the months or years PubliCola has spent waiting for records. These include requests for information about former police chief Adrian Diaz’ alleged use of his security detail to run personal errands and take him to the Portland Airport so he could fly to a Huskies game in Houston; requests related to body camera analysis; requests for information about the killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave in January 2023; and requests for information about Daniel Auderer, the police union leader caught on tape laughing about Kandula’s death.

In the interest of expediting our outstanding requests, PubliCola has closed some of the requests that are no longer timely, like a request for information about parking enforcement officers we filed in June 2022. While we don’t see much point in having SPD produce records on an issue that is no longer newsworthy, our decision in itself illustrates the problem with letting the police sit on public records for months or years. The public deserves to know what the city’s police department is doing with their tax dollars in a timely fashion, not years after the fact—but SPD has designed its policies to delay providing that information for as long as possible.