City of Ferguson Charges Vice More Than $1,200 for Open Records Request, Turns Over Just Seven Emails

Vice
reports:

In the wake of the shooting death of Michael
Brown, police officers in Ferguson, Missouri feared that people in
the community were “gunning” for them, and officers were having a
“rough” time dealing with the news media, according to an email
written by Assistant Police Chief Al Eickhoff.

Eickhoff’s email was one of only seven internal emails the City of
Ferguson turned over to VICE News in response to an open-records
request filed in late September for records pertaining to Brown’s
death and the protests that immediately followed. For those seven
emails, the City of Ferguson charged VICE News a fee of more than
$1,200.

The city clerk told Vice that there were so few
messages because a server outage had interrupted the local
government’s email service.

Vice isn’t the only organization to face
remarkably high fees for Ferguson record requests. A little
over a month ago, the Associated Press
described several similar cases:

“The first line of defense is to make the
requester go away,” said Rick Blum, who coordinates the Sunshine in
Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups that advocates
for open government. He said charging hefty fees “to simply cut and
paste is a popular tactic.”

The Washington Post was told it would need to pay $200 at minimum
for its requests, including city officials’ emails since Aug. 9
discussing Brown’s shooting, citizen complaints against Ferguson
officers and Wilson’s personnel file. The website Buzzfeed
requested in part emails and memos among city officials about
Ferguson’s traffic-citation policies and changes to local
elections, but was told it would cost unspecified thousands of
dollars to fulfill.

Inquiries about Ferguson’s public records requests were referred to
the city’s attorney, Stephanie Karr, who declined to respond to
repeated interview requests from the AP since earlier this month.
Through a spokesman late Monday, Karr said Missouri law can require
fees but she didn’t address why charges specific to the AP’s
request were nearly tenfold the lowest salary in the city clerk’s
office. Karr said searching emails for key words constitutes “extra
computer programming” that can bring added costs.