Jan
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The other side of FOIA
January 4, 2009 |
Our last post on freedom of information laws was a reminder that you have to be determined and persistent when using a FOIA request to get information from the government–even when you are entitled to the information in the first place.
But what about the small number of cases where that approach is less likely to work? There are cases where public employees or elected officials will do everything in their power to hinder you, especially if they perceive that their careers or reputations are threatened. If they really don’t want to help, bureaucrats can make you jump through hoops, wait the full time allowed by the law to hear them say “no,” and then fight a long battle in court–and then when you win, they can hand you a hollow victory by only giving you the documents they wanted you to see.
Before you give up, or publicly lambaste uncooperative officials in print, or get into a protracted legal battle, try to exhaust every other option for getting the information you want. Below are two other avenues to pursue:
1.) The information you want may be held by a different government agency.
One less-than-gallant public official I dealt with actually told me that the city he worked for didn’t have any records pertaining to properties that were owned by the city, located within the city, and contaminated with toxic waste. When I managed to bump into him in the hallway, with one of these folders in hand (oops!), the story changed to something like this: Yes, we have records, but you can’t see all of them, just the ones I want to show you.
I found out rather quickly that a FOIA request wasn’t going to get me much. Then it occurred to me that the state environmental agency would have a file on every cleanup site in the city.
In fact, they had a cubicle set aside for journalists and private citizens to review documents. There was a copier nearby where I was allowed to make all the copies I wanted, for a few cents a page.
I think somebody felt silly when I wrote an article about contaminated property that the city had rezoned “residential” without quite having approval from the state. (They got the approval eventually, but the situation was unbecoming.)
The lesson I learned, was that it’s a lot easier to get the information when you’re not waving a red flag in someone’s face and threatening to sue.
Before you take on public officials in a head-butting contest, think about where else the information may exist. The document may be filed, in duplicate form, but stored within another agency, as it was in this case. Or it might be included in a different kind of record, kept by an agency other than the one you’re dealing with. And if it is, maybe you can get it by simply asking.
2.) The information you want may be held by someone other than the government.
There have been at least three cases where police were accused of wrongdoing to some degree, and despite their refusal to talk or share police reports, I was able to get information from eyewitnesses. In all three cases, I knocked on the door of every home or business with a line of sight, or within earshot of the incident and found out what happened from people who were there, even if I had to come back over a period of days to find the employees who had been working at the right time.
Once I knew what happened, the police had to deal with me. They couldn’t just lock their doors and wait for me to go away; they had to respond.
You can use the same strategy in less dire circumstances. If you want to know something and can’t get the documents–start asking people questions, because it’s better than nothing. Government employees may talk if they are front-line workers, as opposed to managers, but you have to catch them outside of the office.
Another line on police reports: In the U.S. a person has the right to get a copy of a police report if he or she is mentioned. If you are the victim or perpetrator of a crime, you need the report for legal purposes. Frequently, when the police are unwilling to share the report, you can get a copy with ridiculous ease by asking the people named in the report (or their attorneys) to give you a copy. They will have an especially strong interest in helping if it is one of those cases where the police do something wrong and then charge their victims with some heinous crime, such as “resisting arrest” or “creating a disturbance.”
(Nevertheless, remember that you should not name a person accused of a crime until they are arraigned in court, and that goes for police officers as well as civilians.)
This “ex urbe” strategy can be applied to finding other kinds of documents. Paperwork that is filed with the city is first filled out someplace else, so a copy must be in the possession of the architect, or homeowner or attorney who submitted the document. Paperwork that originates inside the city is going to be sent someplace else. Tax bills are mailed out. Copies of zoning decisions are presented to the landowner. A great deal of information is submitted to state and federal agencies to prove compliance with their regulations; specifically, when state or federal money is used, a lot of paperwork is filed before and after a project takes place.
Where else will you find the information you want? If you don’t know, that’s one of the questions to ask when you go around knocking on doors, because having the documents makes your story bulletproof and water-tight.
When you can get the information without a huge fight, it’s not only satisfying, but it eliminates a lot of unnecessary stress that can be caused by banging your head repeatedly against City Hall.
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