Pennsylvania state police narratives are not public records, how will this affect private investigators?

A Pennsylvania state appeals court ruled Thursday that incident reports filed by state police officers are not public records, citing an exemption in the state’s Right to Know Law that protects from public disclosure “a record of an agency relating to or resulting in a criminal investigation.”

Donald Gilliland, who at the time was the managing editor of the Leader-Enterprise, appealed the police department’s decision to the state Office of Open Records, who ruled in Gilliland’s favor. The office stated that “because an incident report is equivalent to a police blotter, and police blotters are excluded from the criminal investigative records exemption … the incident report was a public record.” Under the law, a police blotter is defined as a “chronological listing of arrests.”

The state police then petitioned the appeals court to review the Office of Open Records’ decision. The court agreed with the state police that the incident report did not qualify as a police blotter and was therefore exempt from disclosure. Instead the court held the record to be “a description of an investigation by the state police into a complaint of criminal activity.”

In the dissenting opinion, Judge Dan Pellegrini argued that incident reports are not “criminal investigative material,” a necessary qualification in order for a record to be exempt from a open records request. He also argued that the state police did not uphold its burden under the law to prove why the incident report should be considered “investigative material.”

“The state police provided no guidance as to why the report qualified as investigative material or what specific information in the report was not subject to public access,” he wrote.

“It would be an absurd result if the new Right to Know Law, which was ‘designed to promote access to official government information in order to prohibit secrets, scrutinize the actions of public officials, and make public officials accountable for their actions,’ instead restricted public access to these readily available documents by now making them exempt from disclosure,” wrote Pellegrini.


Links: http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/docs/20100917_121600_pa_ct_opin.pdf
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=11564