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Keeping the public in the dark is a mistake
© St. Petersburg Times So we have these laws that do a lot of good. They make it much easier to catch corrupt politicians. They make it harder, although not, alas, impossible, for influence to be peddled to the highest bidder, and they make the government 'fess up when it has someone in the slammer, and it makes it say why. They provide a means to find out that some harmless sounding company with a name like "Warm Puppies-R-Us," that just bought the land next to you, is really a firm that is under indictment in four other states for unlawful operation of a smoke-belching factory that converts medical waste and raw sewage into slightly radioactive paving material. Those laws make government responsible to the people whose lives it controls and whose money it spends. But some bad people might use the law to commit identity theft, and so, knees jerking at full throttle, a statewide grand jury has recommended that all public records be closed unless there is a specific reason for opening them. Now, let's guess who will be in charge of deciding whether a reason cited as to why the government should open its records will be . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . why, the government, that's who. What a neat idea. Either a bunch of bureaucrats frequently more concerned with protecting their own phony-baloney jobs than with public access to public records -- or a court system that grinds more slowly and less efficiently every day, will decide whether the rest of us have any right to know what they are up to. I have lived and worked in states without open government laws, or where the laws are more honored in the breach rather than the observance, and I have lived in Florida. Believe me, Florida's system is better. A newspaper editor in West Virginia once looked at me peculiarly when I asked him about that state's public records law. "What do you mean?" he asked. "You know, what records the police and courts have to show you when somebody is charged with a crime or on trial." The answer was that only indictments met that test. As to the concept of any information being available about the progress of court cases or investigations, he said, "Oh they, the police or whoever, tell us what they want us to know." He couldn't understand the concept of police or government officials lying. Two hours later the police chief threatened to jail me for asking about the arrest record of a man who had been murdered in Hernando County. I got out of town just in time, and very glad that I didn't have to wait for the local press to tell anyone I was in jail. In Illinois, the City Council I covered met behind closed doors for two hours before the public council meeting, at which it rubber-stamped actions decided on in private. Reporters were allowed to attend the private meeting only if they promised not to write anything about what was said. A lot of bad things happened in that city. When I came to Florida I was taken out for a tour by my colleague, Lucy Morgan, who asked for a file at the Pasco County Courthouse. "I'll have to ask the clerk if I can show you that," said a deputy clerk behind the counter. Ms. Morgan rather firmly, and quite colorfully I thought, informed the deputy clerk how little it mattered what her boss thought and that state law made the document public record, and we could either do it nice or do it with lawyers -- and the clerk handed over the folder. I thought I had died and gone to reporters' heaven, and I still do. Not because the law allows us to spread gossip or satisfy our own prurient interests, but because society, whenever confronted with a choice between too much and too little knowledge, always benefits more from too much. There are other methods, some of them suggested by the same grand jury, to deal with identity theft. There is no doubt that it is a growing problem that needs attention, but blinding the state's populace to information about the internal workings of its government is not the answer.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Ernest Hooper Robert Trigaux John Romano From the Times North Suncoast desks |
