Freedom of Information at Work (Editorial)

For more than a year after 16 bullets entered the body of a teenager armed with a 3-inch knife, a Chicago police officer was free and collecting his pay and prosecutors had dashcam video of the incident.

Only after a judge ordered the public release of dashcam video of the incident, and just hours before the deadline for its release, was the officer charged with a crime. And not just any crime, but first-degree murder.

The prosecutor says the timing was just coincidental, but to us it feels like freedom of information at work. As hard as the video is to watch, and as incendiary as it might be, members of the taxpaying public have a right to know what happened just as surely as the officer has a right to have the charge against him proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Dashcam videos are released all the time, so withholding the video when the shooter was a policeman smacks of special treatment. Similarly, the Hot Springs Police Department was recently ordered to release recordings of 911 calls in the case of the hot-car death of the toddler son of a local judge. To withhold 911 recordings in the case of an elected official when they are routinely released in other cases, as required by the state Freedom of Information Act, felt like the kind of special treatment that can’t be tolerated. (No decision on charges in that case has been made.)

We see the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act being chipped away at all the time, which is why we can no longer give Arkansas Business readers the data on restaurant sales that they enjoyed for decades. There was a time before sunshine laws expressly granted citizens the right to know what their government knows and what their government does, and that right has to be protected vigorously.