Court fight reveals absurdity behind claims about our public records law

As New Jersey lawmakers prepare to gut our Open Public Records Act, it would be helpful for them to understand the kinds of roadblocks we already see when using the law before deciding to add more.

A recent court battle between the New Jersey Monitor and the state Attorney General’s Office illustrates how the law is misused even now — before those proposed new roadblocks become law.

The legal fight started after D.C. think tank Brookings Institution last year hailed a New Jersey criminal justice initiative as one that could be a model for police reform nationwide.

Brookings’ analysis of the program, called Arrive Together, was possible because it had access to “officer narrative reports,” senior Brookings fellow Rashawn Ray said when announcing his findings. Ray conceded it is rare for researchers to obtain this kind of information.

When I heard that, I thought, oh great, if Brookings got their hands on these reports, surely any member of the public can, too. So I filed an Open Public Records Act request for them, as did Ashley Balcerzak over at the Record of Bergen County.

I bet you’ll never guess what happened next. Yep, the state Attorney General’s Office denied our request, saying the documents contain sensitive medical information and are shielded from disclosure.

So, Brookings — where Attorney General Matt Platkin once worked — can see this very sensitive information, but the folks who pay the bills for the Arrive Together program cannot.

We and the Record sued and the case landed in court for about nine months, with Platkin’s office insisting that the records would reveal highly personal information and “cannot be easily redacted.”

“Here, the records provide demographic and geographic data that are potentially sufficient to identify the subject to neighbors and onlookers, and mental health data that is highly sensitive and therefore protected. The consequences of release are enormous. Releasing records that could reveal the identities of individuals who have suffered from mental health crises would not only expose vulnerabilities explicitly protected by State and Federal law; it also would discourage private citizens from calling for desperately-needed help,” an October brief from Platkin’s office reads.

Alarming! So imagine my surprise when, after a judge sided with us and the Record, Platkin’s office released the records and they do not, in fact, come close to revealing highly sensitive information, nor does it appear as though they were all that hard to redact. There are entire pages of information where nothing is redacted, and many of the officer narratives look like this:

Even narratives that initially contained a lot of information are heavily redacted, leaving it impossible for anyone to know who the subjects are:

I’m sure the legislators behind the push to gut the Open Public Records Act don’t care a whit that we had to drag Platkin’s office into court for public records, or that Platkin’s office continued to fight the documents’ release even though they knew they posed no actual danger to anyone suffering from mental illness. But let’s be clear that the chief problem with OPRA is not that it buries clerks under mountains of requests; it’s that public officials abuse the law when they don’t feel like releasing records to the public.

CJ Griffin fought for us in court. Griffin, a vocal critic of the OPRA revamp bill, said this is another example of how the public has to fight tooth and nail to get records from the government.

“Too often agencies make these absurd ‘the world will end if these records are released’ claims, and then when the judge orders disclosure it’s no big deal. Here they barely redacted a thing, yet they wasted all this money trying to be secretive,” Griffin said.

She also noted the importance of a provision of OPRA that requires public entities to pay requestors’ legal fees if they lose public records disputes in court, a key enforcement mechanism of the law. The bill would ax that requirement.

I asked Platkin’s office to comment on our contention that their court arguments pleading for privacy seem alarmist given that we’ve now seen the documents. Spokesman Michael Symons said this:

“Our office prioritizes safeguarding the privacy and trust established by initiatives like ARRIVE Together, ensuring a positive mental health response at the most appropriate times without inadvertently compromising individuals’ identities during vulnerable moments. We extend this commitment to our mental and behavioral health partners, treating the information they share with law enforcement with the same care and dignity as they do. The success of programs like ARRIVE Together hinges on the trust we’ve built with participants, their families, communities, and partners.”