State Police ramps up secrecy on fatal traffic accidents
By Roy Ockert Jr.
June 23, 2015
Somebody in the upper ranks of the Arkansas State Police apparently wants the agency to keep accident reports secret from the public. Maybe it’s the natural police penchant for keeping details close to the vest, or maybe it’s just the bother of compiling them for public consumption.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported Monday that earlier this month the ASP began withholding nearly all personal information from vehicle accident reports, including the names of people injured. The new policy apparently allows only the release of the name and hometown of a person killed in an accident.
Then agency cites the 1994 federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act as its authority, despite the fact that law had been in effect for 21 years before someone in the State Police discovered it.
This change in policy explains why The Jonesboro Sun and Jonesboro television station KAIT reported over the weekend little more than the fact that a 67-year-old Jonesboro woman died in a horrific accident on Arkansas 1 Saturday evening. The Sun reported there were no other injuries. That’s what one might conclude because the “Preliminary Fatal Crash Summary,” a media report, leaves blank the section under “Injured.”
Yet the television station reported that traffic was blocked for 2 hours while two medical helicopters and several ambulances were called to the scene. Several vehicles were involved, two of them colliding head-on. The woman killed was a passenger in one; did the unidentified driver walk away unhurt?
Bill Sadler, ASP spokesman, told KAIT that the agency no longer reports injuries. A former journalism student at Arkansas State University, Sadler knows that’s a bad policy, but his job is to carry out the orders of his superiors, however wrong.
A fatal accident that closes down a main road may be common in Little Rock, where State Police officials live and work, but it’s not in other places around the state. It’s a public event, a tragedy that involves the expenditure of thousands of tax dollars to manage the scene, investigate the circumstances and clean up the mess.
The public has the right to know what happened and why, and the ASP has a responsibility to report that information. You can’t do that by leaving out critical information, such as the names of the injured and whether citations were issued.
The Sun’s fatal accident story appeared under a small headline on the same page with a story about a domestic dispute with a much larger headline — at least in part because many more details were available about the latter. Not to minimize domestic violence, but it’s incongruous for our law enforcement agencies to release far more information about a couple’s dispute than about the loss of a life in an accident.
An internal State Police directive dated June 4, provided to local law enforcement agencies, spells out its new policy for dealing with crash reports. It includes an asinine requirement that most requests for reports be submitted by mail or in person to headquarters in Little Rock.
The ASP has always been slow to release official accident reports, partly because many troopers work in rural areas far from section offices, and they may be hard-pressed to complete all their paperwork in one shift. That’s why the agency began releasing timely media reports a few years ago. For fatal accidents those are still available through the State Police Web site.
However, beginning Jan. 1, the State Police began refusing requests for accident reports unless the requestor could specify the date of the accident, county in which it occurred and the name of at least one person involved in the accident. That change was in response to Act 1229 of 2013, a law passed because one accident bothered a legislator, state Sen. Eddie Joe Williams, R-Cabot.
The law was aimed at stopping lawyers from soliciting business from families with a child involved in an accident. It requires the names of such juveniles to be redacted, but ASP officials said they lacked the manpower to redact information on thousands of reports so they would just stop “bulk inspection” of public records.
New software supposedly now allows more redactions, apparently including the names of accident victims, thus the latest policy change, according to the Democrat-Gazette.
The problem with the State Police action is that the Drivers Privacy Protection Act doesn’t apply to accident reports. It specifically applies to the records of “a state department of motor vehicles,” of which ASP is not one, and doesn’t even mention accident reports.
I checked more than a half-dozen other legal sources, including some in other states, and found not a single one that interprets the law like ASP. In fact, most say specifically, like the Ohio Bar Association that “the DPPA does not protect information about a person’s vehicular accidents, driving violations and driver’s status.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center points out that the law was passed to stop criminal abuse of motor vehicle records, one example of which allowed an obsessed fan in 1989 to find and kill actress Rebecca Schaeffer.
Local police agencies, including the Jonesboro Police Department, continue to treat accident reports as public records, following Act 1229 as to juveniles.
State Police records policy changes have already resulted in one lawsuit, and the latest policy should be challenged in court, too. Either the ASP violated the law for 21 years, or it is doing so now. It’s a serious misreading of the law that violates the spirit of open government in Arkansas.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.