Police shouldn’t charge new fee

The Spokane Police Department figures the public doesn’t care. That’s the bottom line to the news that the department is attaching special fees of dubious legality to public records requests in order to recoup some costs.

Beginning today, the department will charge a new $1.50 fee for certain documents that have blacked-out information and 50 cents per additional page. Clerks black out – or redact – personal information, such as the names of juveniles, in theft and property crime reports before turning them over to the public. The department used to charge nothing for these records, which are often sought by people for insurance purposes.

The legal rationale used by the department for instituting this new fee is not unlike that used by a child testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. The department’s legal adviser told records managers to give it a shot, and if it isn’t legal, they can always stop.

But Greg Overstreet, a special assistant attorney general for Government Accountability, said he couldn’t find anything in state statutes that justifies such a fee. “It seems to me that making redactions is one of the costs associated with making them available for copying.”

It seems that way for most people. The department’s records manager says Spokane is only doing what other cities are doing, but the lone example he could provide was Seattle, which does not charge for blacking out documents.

Many cities are facing budget crunches, but they haven’t found it necessary to flout the state’s public records act to generate revenue. Besides, citizens are already taxed to pay the wages of the employees who process public records. Does the city plan to attach special fees to every task carried out by its workers?

In addition to the new redaction fee, it appears the department has been illegally charging a $12 flat fee for traffic collision reports. State law doesn’t support a special fee for such reports, and the attorney general’s office told the Police Department that some years ago.

Seattle charges nothing for such reports if the requesting party was directly involved in the accident. When asked why the Spokane Police Department didn’t stop charging the fee, an official could offer only: “It wasn’t addressed.”

It’s not likely that any of this will be addressed unless the courts compel the department to stop imposing special fees on public records requests.

Meanwhile, the public ought to be outraged at the Police Department’s insensitivity to the spirit of open government as well as its disregard for the public records law. If the police can get away with it, what’s to stop other government agencies in search of extra money?