We’ve already learned that Ferguson’s city hall routinely shakes down black residents with a corrupt system of ticket-happy cops and fine-gouging municipal courts, and that Michael Brown was killed when he tried to walk away from a cop trying to write him a jaywalking ticket that likely would have cost him hundreds of dollars.
Now the media are getting their own taste of Ferguson’s extortion machine. Reporters seeking public records related to the Michael Brown case are being told they’ll have to pay thousands of dollars for a few emails or document copies.
You’ve gotta hand it to these guys: They don’t just rob poor blacks. They’ll pickpocket anyone they can, including journalists in a position to make them look bad. That takes chutzpah. (But then, how much worse can Ferguson look?)
Of course, these exorbitant fees are a tactic to discourage requests for public records that, under state law, must be made released to the public on request. Governments typically are allowed by public records disclosure laws to charge reasonable fees for research and copying. In Washington state, whose public records law was enacted by voter initiative, public agencies typically charge a few cents per page for copies and may can be ordered by courts to pay large penalties for not timely and fully complying with records requests. (For example, Stefan Sharanksky, a former Seattle conservative blogger, extracted a $225,000 fine from the King County Elections Department.) Missouri’s law lets public entities set their own charges, but specifies they must be “reasonable.”
One way for recalcitrant officials to try getting around this is by padding such charges with “consultant” fees. For example, “Ferguson told the AP it wanted nearly $2,000 to pay a consulting firm for up to 16 hours of work to retrieve messages on its own email system, a practice that information technology experts call unnecessary,” CBS News said. Of course, Ferguson’s city bureaucrats didn’t invent this form of stonewalling. “Other governments also have demanded spectacular fees. During the 2008 presidential campaign, for instance, news organizations asked for emails belonging to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin…. The Anchorage Press said officials at first wanted $6,500 in search fees, leading the newspaper to withdraw its request. Thousands of pages of those emails were ultimately provided to news organizations for about $725 in copying charges.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ferguson-fee-to-turn-over-brown-files-10-times-a-city-workers-salary/
When public officials act like they’re trying to hide something, they likely have something to hide
.