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ALISA ULFERTSTwo bills would keep personal information in complaint filings private and guarantee the review of witnesses' testimony.
TALLAHASSEE - For Tim Ingold, the matter is simple.
"If it wasn't a public record before, it shouldn't be after," said Ingold, a lieutenant with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and a district director with the Fraternal Order of Police.
Ingold was talking about records, some very personal, that sometimes are gathered when a complaint is filed against a law enforcement officer. Those can include bank account numbers, cell phone logs and other items that might be needed to prove or disprove a complaint.
Now those and other records generated during an investigation become public once the investigation is over.
But under a bill filed by state Sen. Mike Fasano, "personal and private" records would remain exempt from state public records laws, even if a complaint against an officer is found to be valid.
Fasano, R-New Port Richey, said Senate Bill 652 is intended to protect officers who are the subject of frivolous complaints.
"Sometimes people are just unhappy and file a complaint," he said. "It protects the law enforcement officer."
Should the complaint result in criminal charges, much of that information could become public at that time, he said.
But the bill doesn't define "personal or private" records except to say they include but are not limited to phone and financial records, video and audio cassettes, e-mail messages or "other objects made by or which are the property of the law enforcement officer and intended for or restricted to his or her use."
"You could drive a truck through that definition," said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, an open government advocacy group in Tallahassee.
Some personal records, such as bank records, already are exempt from public records laws. And by leaving the definition of "personal or private" open-ended, the bill would preclude any opportunity for public oversight of law enforcement investigations, Petersen said.
"It's like the fox guarding the henhouse, and when the henhouse gets broken into, it's the fox investigating the fox," Petersen said.
Fasano said he's open to altering parts of the bill to ensure public oversight, but stressed that his intent is to protect the privacy of officers who might have done nothing to warrant complaints.
Fasano filed the bill at the request of the FOP, which has made its passage a priority. It has a companion bill, also sponsored by Fasano, that is intended to beef up the law enforcement officer's bill of rights.
That bill says any officer who is the subject of a complaint should have the right to review all information in the case, including testimony given by witnesses, before he or she is interviewed for the investigation.
Some police departments have been waiting until after the officer is formally interviewed to speak to witnesses, robbing the officer of the chance to know what is said about him or her before answering to the complaint, Ingold said.
"It's a rather disingenuous form of providing the accused officer his bill of rights," Ingold said.
Senate Bill 650 would require law enforcement agencies to interview witnesses before they interview the accused officer.