Use of Force and an Upcoming Webinar!
Ohio Public Records Briefing - Edition #111
Welcome back – we’re at Issue 111. There must be some secret meaning in that number!
Here’s a guided tour of today’s adventures.
This week we’re building an entire issue around use of force reports. We start with a case that shut the door on blanket CLEIR denials of use of force reports.
Boom! That’ll be that door slamming.
From there, we head to Alabama for a body cam review that highlights just how differently our neighbors treat this footage.
And then we close with a reader Q&A on redacting use of force narratives that officers copy and paste from open-case incident reports.
And, we’re scheduling our next members-only Public Records Briefing webinar. Mark your calendars for at Noon, Tuesday, May 12. The topic will be “The Price of ‘No’: When Denials Get Expensive.” We’ll cover all the ways getting public records can cost your agency big bucks.
Ready? Let’s rock.
Court Case(s) Review: State ex rel. Standifer v. Cleveland
Today, our case review and question go hand in hand. You all asked us about use of force reports, and we wanted to give you a background on the current landscape.
In this 2022 opinion, the Ohio Supreme Court made it significantly easier for the public to get detailed police use of force reports under Ohio’s Public Records Act. Journalist Cid Standifer and her newspaper asked the city of Cleveland for the individual reports that officers fill out when they use a certain level of force on the job. These reports spell out why the officer was on scene, what led up to the force, how much resistance the officer met, and exactly what kind of force the officer used. The reports themselves generally aren’t part of the criminal case or investigation, but they’re obviously related.
The city handed over summary spreadsheets but refused to release the full individual reports for dozens of incidents, claiming they were completely protected as “confidential law-enforcement investigatory records,” or CLEIR.
As a brief refresher, law enforcement agencies lean on the CLEIR exception all the time, but it isn’t the catch-all some assume it to be. To qualify, a record must pass a two-part test. First, it must actually “pertain to a law enforcement matter” of a criminal, civil, or administrative nature -- not a routine personnel or employment file. Second, releasing the record must create a “high probability” of revealing one of the four categories of CLEIR protected information: the identity of an uncharged suspect, a confidential source or witness, specific investigatory techniques or investigatory work product, or information that would endanger someone’s safety. If the agency can’t satisfy both prongs, the record goes out the door.