NYPD Claims Secrecy For Its Freedom of Information Request Criteria

The New York Police Department has earned a
notoriously poor
reputation for transparency. According to a report unveiled
last year by former New York City Public Advocate and current
mayor, Bill de Blasio, about a third of information requests are
ignored. When agency representatives do respond, they habitually
deny access to material, often citing questionable
problems with the requests. To make matters worse, all requests
must be made by postal mail. Hoping to dig to the root of this,
Shawn Musgrave submitted an information request for the
accept-or-reject criteria for an information request. The request
was
rejected on the grounds that the information is a “privileged
attorney-client work-product.”

Citizens can submit Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests
to any New York state agency to promote government transparency and
accountability. Agencies are required to respond to requests, but
there are several exemptions
intended to protect safety, privacy, national security, and other
concerns. But Boing Boing
argues that the NYPD has “invented its own, extra-legal system
of ‘classified’ documents that it has unilaterally decided it
doesn’t have to provide to the public.”

In officer Jonathan David’s reply to Musgrave, David argues that
the requested records “reflect confidential communications between
members of the FOIL unit and their attorneys” and “preparation of
these records called upon attorneys to apply the skills and talents
of an attorney, making these records attorney work product.”

Musgrave, editor of MuckRock, a website that facilitates FOIL
request submissions,
explains in a blog post, “That a lawyer reviewed or even
drafted these documents does not make them exempt from disclosure.”
Musgrave continues:

Handbooks and training materials hardly qualify as
‘confidential communications,’ particularly when the subject matter
is transparency itself.

Brand new reports paint an unsettling portrait of transparency
requests at the federal level. The Associated Press

determined, based on U.S. federal FOIA data, that last year,
the “most transparent administration ever” censored or denied
access to more information than ever before. In another
report compiled by the Center for Effective Government (CEG),
15 agencies were ranked on an A-F grading scale based on their
performance in handling FOIA requests—eight passed. Of the eight,
four received D’s. Perhaps the NYPD is simply a particularly
egregious cluster caught in a web of wider unaccountability.