from the THE-FILES-ARE-IN-THE-COMPUTER-[ape-noises] dept
To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to punch up, even if that occasionally means kicking them when they’re down.
Enter the Massachusetts State Police. These troopers may be generally capable and not completely terrible at all times, but they’ve still managed to rack up headlines at non-cop-focused sites as far-flung as Techdirt.com. Remember the time when the MSP accidentally exposed its surveillance of police critics with some poorly cropped photos of their cop shop workstations? Or how about the time a citizen complaint about a trooper triggered an investigation resulting in a bunch of troopers being fired for time card fraud? Or maybe you recall the MSP saying some nice things about dialing back its use of no-knock warrants before immediately violating the just-invoked policy changes?
Yeah, I hear you, unnamed critic who thinks these are relatively mild misconduct instances. I mean, that’s just what we’re told we’re obliged to accept. Things could always be worse, say reps for agencies with only mild misconduct problems. In comparison (gestures broadly at US law enforcement in general) we’re doing pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. We’re asked to treat near-competence as excellence by cops and their reps. Pretty disgusting, especially when plenty of cop defenders pretend it’s our subpar educational system making life unbearable for them at the moment.
Well, we don’t get what we pay for, that’s for sure. Premium payments. Somewhat tolerable service. Even the small things are done poorly far too often. Public records enthusiast Andrew Quemere was recently on the receiving end of some subprime service from the Massachusetts State Police — something that began with an extended delay entirely the fault of the MSP.
The Mass Dump requested the use-of-force data on March 29, 2022, and the internal affairs data on April 20, 2022. State law requires all state agencies to respond to public records requests in writing within 10 business days and provide records within 15 business days.
However, the commonwealth’s largest law-enforcement agency acted as though it was above the law for 11 months.
When the Mass Dump first submitted the requests, the State Police simply ignored them. In both cases, the Mass Dump filed an appeal with the Public Records Division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office shortly after the State Police failed to respond within 10 business days.
The State Police had eleven months to get this right. And the MSP still screwed it up. It didn’t take the State Police another eleven months to realize it had failed to redact some information in this release to Quemere, however. MSP reps were right on top of that. Within a day of publication, Quemere was contacted by the MSP’s chief legal counsel, Jennifer Staples.
“Unfortunately, the information we provided did not have the dates of birth of the troopers redacted, that information should have been redacted pursuant to the privacy exemption to the public records law,” Staples said in an email on Tuesday night.
She added: “We are concerned because publishing the dates of birth of troopers poses a very serious safety risk for the troopers and their families. As such, we are requesting that you remove the information immediately.”
Staples didn’t bother to explain how publication of cops’ birth dates created a “serious safety risk,” but obviously the data can help ID fraudsters do their thing, so not an entirely unreasonable request. Oh no, wait. The other thing. There’s no legal precedent for this demand to redact the information the MSP failed to redact over the eleven months it spent jerking Quemere around.
The following day, the MSP’s lawyer sent a “new” version of the misconduct/use of force data to “replace” the one with the birth dates left exposed. Once again, Staples reiterated that troopers’ lives were at stake, although she once again failed to provide any explanation for this assumption.
But this version of the data left the data intact, too.
[W]hoever created this “redacted” spreadsheet fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Instead of deleting the data, this person simply changed the background color of the cells with the birthdates to black to match the color of the text.
If you change the background color to white or to another color, all the dates become visible again. It’s also possible to view the date in a cell by highlighting it and looking at the formula bar in Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet program.
Rather than keep being hassled by the lawyer, Quemere did for free what a $411 million/year agency couldn’t do twice: properly redacted the “unsafe” birth dates. That’s very generous, considering the MSP still owes him $180 in public records processing fees — fees it collected and kept despite ultimately refusing to hand over anything Quemere requested. Work that can’t be done right by the people being paid handsomely to do it shouldn’t be performed for free by people who need the financial assistance of readers to continue to perform this much more useful public service.
Filed Under: massachusetts, massachusetts state police, msp, public records, redaction failure, transparency, use of force data
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