Citizens get short shrift from officials on public information
Ombudsman
By Paul McMasters
First Amendment Ombudsman
First Amendment Center
11.02.98
After the votes are counted in precincts across the nation tomorrow, the pundits and politicians will no doubt decry poor voter turnout and blame it on poor citizenship.
Few will mention, however, that one of the primary reasons citizens don't get more involved in their civic duties is the way they are treated when they seek information about the way their government operates.
The truth is that most public officials actively discourage citizenship at its most important intersection: between the individual citizens and the local offices and agencies where political policies and decisions translate into the reality of daily life for voters and taxpayers.
One would think that public officials would be delighted when private citizens walk through their doors in search of records and documents. After all, such visits should be regarded as an affirmation of their value and necessity, as well as an opportunity for enlisting supporters and allies.
Instead, the private citizen more often is treated as a meddler, a nuisance, an interloper, someone who must be sent packing with as much haste and as little information as possible.
The most recent hard evidence of this attitude among local government officials is an audit of their responses to citizen requests for information in all 135 cities and counties in Virginia. The state's newspapers conducted the audit to see how well public officials complied with the state's freedom of information law by sending out employees to request records and documents as ordinary citizens.
The results were dismal. Almost half of the time, requesters were unable to get the information the law said they should have access to. Often, they were subjected to interrogation or outright hostility from officials and employees at school boards, administrative offices, health departments and police and sheriff's departments.
Requests for law enforcement information, arguably the most important information a citizen can seek, were most often denied — only 16% of the time were requesters given the information the law says should be publicly available.
The local officials' responses to these information requests ranged from ignorance of the law to "a gleeful disregard" of it, reported Pamela Stallsmith in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Many of the requesters had to return to offices several times or found themselves being routed through a maze of bureaucracy, often finally being told the information was not available."
Often, officials demanded the requesters' names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as their motives. In one case the requester's race was demanded. Virginia law requires that the information sought in this audit should be made available to any state resident who asks for it, regardless of reason.
"How would you like it if somebody came to your house and asked to see your personal records?" a sheriff's officer in Northumberland County asked in denying a requester the right to see the department's crime log.
In another county, a sheriff's dispatcher acknowledged the requirements of the state's law, then said, "But this is Bath County."
In New Kent County, a sergeant began shouting when asked for the crime log. He said it was not a public record, "Not in New Kent County, not today."
A secretary in Isle of Wight County yelled at the requester and when asked whether the requested document was a public document said, "It might be but I'm not going to give it to you."
A Russell County health inspector wanted to know why the requester wanted a report. When the requester explained that she was a concerned citizen, he asked, "What are you concerned about?"
And so it goes. In Indiana and Rhode Island, similar audits of local officials' attitudes toward providing public information to the public yield very similar results. Time after time, citizens encounter difficulty, delay and denial in trying to find out information vital to evaluation of government policy and performance, even though the law and court decisions say they have a right to the information.
It is particularly ironic that so many public officials in Virginia — home of the Jeffersonian principle of an informed citizenry — don't know or won't acknowledge the right of the people to information that they pay to collect, and for whose benefit it was collected in the first place.
The point of citizens' participation in their own governance is to make government policies and actions more understood and, thus, better supported. The key to an involved citizenry is an informed citizenry.
Public governance is not a private party. Everyone is invited. Government officials, particularly at the local level, need to recognize that when taxpayers and voters keep getting turned away at the door, it won't be long before the party becomes a wake for the demise of good government.
Paul McMasters can be reached by e-mail at pmcmasters@freedomforum.org.