Our View: Right to know
The Spokane police union, a Spokane mayor and now the Spokane firefighters union all thought their “right to privacy” claims were exceptional. They were wrong for many of the same reasons.
Public employees and their unions could save everybody a lot of money if they would just accept what the courts are clearly telling them: Exceptions to the state’s public records statutes are rare. And that’s exactly what voters wanted when they overwhelmingly adopted the Public Disclosure Act in 1972.
The latest case involved former Spokane firefighter Daniel Ross, who resigned when it was revealed that he had consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl at a firehouse. He also used a city-owned computer to access an online dating site, where he first met the teenager.
The city was about to release its human resources report on the Ross case to the public when the firefighters union interceded, saying disclosure would humiliate Ross and would not be in the public’s interest. The union also said such a disclosure would violate a labor contract agreement with the city that stipulated that in exchange for cooperating in investigations, union members would be granted confidentiality.
Some of the issues in this case had already been hashed out in the legal system in the Jim West case and in a 1980s legal case involving a club run by the Spokane Police Guild that had violated its liquor license when officers engaged in improper acts at a bachelor party with a stripper.
West said he should have been exempt from public records law because there was no public interest in revealing the contents of his city-owned computer’s hard drive and that doing so would be “highly offensive to a reasonable person.” A judge rejected those arguments.
In the police guild case, the union attempted to block the state liquor board from releasing its report on violations that caused a suspension of the club’s liquor license. Among other things, the union said an exemption to public records law was warranted because officers were granted confidentiality in exchange for telling investigators what happened.
The case went to the state Supreme Court, which rejected the union’s arguments. The court ruled that confidentiality agreements do not trump the public’s right to know.
In the Ross case, the firefighters union made similar arguments, but Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor had an obvious precedent to follow in declaring the city’s investigation a public record.
If the embarrassment or humiliation of public employees routinely exempted them from public records disclosure, there wouldn’t be much point to having a public records law. Though all of these cases involve sex, there are many other kinds of embarrassing activities that the public has a right to know about.
Furthermore, if confidentiality agreements were deemed legitimate bars to public knowledge, those would quickly proliferate and secrecy would reign.
Judge O’Connor correctly ruled that public interest, not self-interest, should prevail. It was an easy call.