Kentucky State Police must release arrest and traffic stop records, court rules
In a case with broad implications for government transparency, the Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the Kentucky State Police must release to the public most of its citations database containing an estimated eight million entries about vehicle stops and arrests.
A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the state police cannot refuse an Open Records Act request from the Courier Journal of Louisville because some information in the database is private and can be redacted, including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and names of juvenile offenders.
When the Courier Journal asked the state police in October 2017 to remove the database fields containing private information and release the rest, the police refused, calling that “an unreasonable burden.” The electronic format used by state police does not easily allow for one or more fields to be removed, so an entirely new database would have to be created, requiring much tedious, time-consuming work, police said.
However, in its decision Friday, the appeals court said it was the state police’s duty to keep its public records in a database that could be redacted and released under open records laws. There were several available options, the court said. That the state police chose not to use a better format is its own responsibility, it said.
A public agency “should not be able to rely on any inefficiency in its own internal record keeping system to thwart an otherwise proper open records request,” Chief Judge Denise Clayton of Louisville wrote for the panel. “Under KSP’s expansive interpretation, an agency could refuse any open records request requiring even minimal redaction on the grounds that it necessitates the creation of a ‘new record.’”
Open records advocate Amye Bensenhaver, a former state assistant attorney general, called Friday’s decision “a great victory.”
“It states very clearly that the courts will show no sympathy for public agencies that keep their public records in an inaccessible format, and who complain that it would take them too much effort to produce them when the public wants to see them,” Bensenhaver said.
“We have heard this argument throughout time, that it is simply too difficult for a public agency to comply with a request, that they don’t know how to produce it, that their database is really just meant to be for internal use only,” she said. “That is unacceptable. If this is a public record, then the burden is on you to keep it in a format that allows you to produce it upon request.”
The Courier Journal previously won favorable decisions in the case from the attorney general’s office and Franklin Circuit Court. The state police repeatedly appealed.
The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Court of Appeals to support the state police. The cabinet said it maintains at least 44 databases with public records and argued that requiring them to be upgraded so that private information could be removed to comply with a sweeping open records request would be costly and time-consuming.
This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 2:42 PM.
