Editor’s Letter: The government doesn’t accept credit cards when it comes to FOIA and public records
Do you know how to order something from Amazon one day from the couch, pay with a linked credit card and have the package on your doorstep the next day?
Yes – government transparency doesn’t work that way.
Sara Scott, the editor of MLive’s statewide reporting team, found out recently when she spent most of a day driving around southeast Michigan picking up paper copies of government documents for a reporting project we’re working on.
“It was nice leaving the office,” Scott said, half jokingly. “But it’s shocking that nowadays we can’t pay by credit card or Venmo and then have them sent to us digitally. For us, these are not necessarily easy to reach places. “
Scott leads a reporting project on police responses to crimes, injuries and deaths at the Faster Horses Music Festival, held each July at Michigan International Speedway near Jackson. The 2021 festival was overshadowed by four deaths – three from carbon monoxide poisoning and one to a woman with no known cause of death.
After MLive covered the deaths, reporter Gus Burns took over the lead of follow-up investigative coverage. When the police investigation remained open after many weeks, he turned to inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act – commonly known as FOIA – to try to get more substance out.
“Originally the police said they were looking for a suspect and that this woman died of unknown reasons, and that obviously raises more questions than answers,” he said. “You said it was still an ‘open investigation so we can’t give you anything’. So we broadened to look at the festival more broadly.”
This is where the hurdles emerged that are inherent in the archaic and inefficient public right to knowledge. It works like it was captured on this week’s Behind the Headlines podcast with Scott and Burns:
Scott: “They say, ‘We’ll start pulling ourselves together if you pay us half,’ so we say for sure, this is our credit card. They say, ‘No, we only take personal checks.’ “
Burns: “I didn’t have a check.”
Scott: “Apparently I’m the only one on our team who is over 50. So I started writing a series of personal checks and mailing them to these little police departments. When the reports finally came in, they digitized (as we said) and emailed them to them. ‘Oh, no, no – we can’t do that.’ “
Burns: “‘They’re all put together,’ they say, ‘so that’s going to be a lot of extra money because I have to take out the staples.'”
That might sound weird, but it’s not funny. Government documents are your documents, and barriers to transparency are barriers to the accountability of the authorities you expect to work on your behalf.
“It is probably our primary vehicle for communicating to our readers and the public how the local government is spending its taxpayers’ money,” said Scott. But she adds, “The (FOIA) system, especially in Michigan, is set up to make it difficult.”
This is evidenced by her day as she drove through two counties, stopped at government offices and wrote checks for paper copies of police reports. It also shows that MLive will do whatever it takes to gain access to the public information we need to tell a full story.
MLive is still waiting for information from other sources, but Scott’s day trip produced a wealth of information that Burns and other reporters investigate to deepen our understanding of the years of police action at Faster Horses.
“I think there are several cases that the public will find very, very worrying and very shocking,” said Scott, adding that the information in the reports will lead reporters to new sources for interviews and, perhaps, more requests for information.
“This is the next step, now that we know exactly some of the things that happened at this festival.”
The road to open information in Michigan is often a long and bumpy road. As Sara Scott demonstrated this summer, MLive will go one step further to find out the full story for you.
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Do you have a personal story about an experience at the Faster Horses Festival? If so, send MLive an email to projects@mlive.com.
To hear the entire conversation with Sara Scott and Gus Burns about FOIA’s weaknesses, the Faster Horses investigation, and their ideas on improving FOIA law and public access to records, tune in this episode of the podcast Behind the Headlines.
John Hiner is Vice President of Content for the MLive Media Group. If you have any questions for him to answer or topics to explore, share your thoughts with us editor@mlive.com.
