E107: Investigating with public records - Sunshine Week special

In this special episode for Sunshine Week, we spotlight four outstanding investigative reporters—Amanda Fries, Maddi O’Neill, Darcy Costello and Katie Mettler. This discussion dives into the power of public records in investigative journalism, the challenges of accessing crucial information, and the stories that shaped their reporting. From police misconduct to opioid lawsuits and government accountability, these journalists reveal how they uncover the truth. Tune in for an eye-opening conversation on the fight for transparency!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introductions
• 2:50 The role of public records in investigative journalism
• 36:56 Challenges in accessing public records
• 46:02 The stories that almost got away
• 51:15 The future of public records

Transcript

0:01

Welcome everyone. I am delighted to have for sort of a special double shot, Sunshine Week and Women's History Month, four fabulous women investigative reporters. And we'll be talking about Sunshine Week, which we're celebrating this week and the role of public records in investigative reporting, what's going right, what's going wrong, how we can all work together. But before we jump in, let's, here from our panel we've got four fabulous women we'll start with Amanda and then we'll go to Maddie, Darcy and Katie. So Amanda welcome and introduce yourself. Thank you. Yes, I'm Amanda Frese. I'm the Wilmington Watchdog Reporter for Delaware Aligned, the news journal. And I'm subsequently shifting into a more of a statewide watchdog role as we speak. Wonderful. All right, Maddie. Hi, thank you for having me, Rebecca. I'm Maddie O'Neill. I am currently a freelance reporter, and at the moment I am covering the legislative session for the Baltimore banner, but I kind of pop around and do, you know, all kinds of stuff. Terrific, thanks. All right, Darcy. Hi, I'm Darcy. Until recently, I was a criminal justice reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Terrific. All right and Katie bring us home. Tell us about you. My name is Katie Metler. I am a criminal justice and state government reporter for The Washington Post. So the reason that I selected each of you, aside from the fact that you do amazing work and I thought you'd make a great panel discussion, is each of you for MDDC's annual awards conference submitted work in the investigative reporting category. and your stories were anything, Maddie had opioid drug companies flooding the market with opioids. Darcy spoke or wrote about expired misconduct cases from Baltimore police. Katie, you wrote about a maximum security psych hospital and how conditions there just sort of went off the rails in a climate of chaos. And then Amanda wrote about how improper practices and crumbling facilities caused a Dover nonprofit to lose federal money. And so I wanted just to ask you all generally, and we can start maybe with going back to Amanda, but for each of you, how this story kind of germinated, was it with public records and sort of how it germinated and where public records came into your reporting? Well, that's a great question because the way I found out about this particular nonprofit and some of the issues that they were experiencing is because of whistleblowers and folks who are on the board and were brave enough to come forward and say, "Something's not right here, and we trust you to look into this further." They did help by providing a lot of records that I wouldn't have been able to get otherwise, whether it was meeting minutes or emails that have been exchanged among board members. So thankfully, we had people who were willing to share information to tell the story. On top of that, I subsequently then went and requested records from the state health department, as well as the housing authority, because they do regular monitoring with the contractors that they are providing grants for. And Interfaith was one of those entities that received funding from the housing authority to provide housing for those who are experiencing homelessness, as well as those who specifically with interfaith, they deal with the sex offender population. getting those records is what really revealed some of the issues that were going on and authenticated what these board members were saying when it comes to some of the issues, because there were reports that were saying, hey, you aren't using this money properly. There's a question of whether you're requiring people to sign certain things that should not be happening with this grant funding. Because when it comes to federal dollars and state dollars, when you receive those grant funds, there are rules and regulations you have to follow. And when you don't, that's how you run the risk of losing those funds. And I love that rules and regulations mean public records. So it sounds like you were using sources to get the ideas and sort of circle in on the problem and then the documents kind of prove it. So Darcy, tell me a little bit about how you were looking at expired misconduct cases. Cause that's a huge issue in Baltimore. I would say it was somewhat similar. Like I had been covering, there's like a civilian body called the Administrative Charging Committee. There's one in every jurisdiction across Maryland and they're the group of non-police officers who decide what an officer who's being disciplined should be charged with. So I'd been sort of following that body's work, like trying to make connections with people. And I wrote about how The Baltimore Police Department had been getting them cases very close to deadline, forcing them to really cram in a lot of body cam review and file review really in a short period of time. And I think I heard about the fact that there was like a folder of expired cases that came over from a source originally. And I sort of had my ears peeled for it. It got mentioned at a statewide panel. separately, sort of. And so it was a similar case of where public records really confirmed what I had heard about and suspected. And so I kind of worked around BPD because a lot of times the police departments may take a long time to fill records requests because they get a lot, they're understaffed, whatever. So I worked around them and tried to go through the city government agency that staffs the administrative charging committee and they ended up sending me this spreadsheet that confirmed it. And actually it was interesting because getting their spreadsheet then prompted BPD to be like, actually we can give you something too. And so then the story kind of came together blending those two and like they had sort of different numbers, different like dates for each of the files. So it's kind of still to be reported out like what exactly those cases were. and exactly how many of them there were and why. But yeah, the public records definitely were confirmation of an issue that people were talking about. And I think there in your situation, Darcy, I love how you sort of went around, like you knew the records that I want are over here, but the best way to, you know, expeditiously get what I want is really like to the side and around the corner. And so kind of, we can talk a little bit more about how you leverage different avenues of information, because it's very rare that there's just one Holy grail, you know, like you can get information in a lot of ways. Katie, why don't we go to you? Tell us about your journey into the climate of chaos. I'm so excited to talk about this actually when you invited us on I told my editors like, please let me do this. Public records are my passion. I background is I started my career in Florida and they have amazing public records laws. And so public records laws in Maryland have always been a real challenge for me to navigate because I was so used to basically requesting something and like 10 minutes later, having it on my desk. In this particular story, it started with a tip that the the then CEO of Clifton T. Perkins Maximum Security Hospital, which is for the forensically mentally ill people who have committed crimes or been charged with crimes, but who are also incompetent to stand trial or suffer from severe mental illness, go to this hospital. The idea that they are treated rather than put in prison or jail. And we had heard that the CEO of the hospital had had a restraining order taken out against him by two of his colleagues. one of them the director of nursing at the hospital and the other his boss at the Maryland Department of Health. And so I went straight to the courthouse and got a copy of the restraining order and it started from there. Pretty quickly realized that this was just the tip of the iceberg, that there was a lot more going on at the hospital. The challenge with a place like Perkins is that it's not a prison and it's not a jail. And so the public records laws that would allow us to get information about say someone who is a defendant at a Maryland state prison don't apply necessarily to the hospital. Often officials will hide behind HIPAA, say that these are, you know, this is a hospital, you can't get these records. But it's not, I mean it is, but people are there not by their own free will. And so from the jump, I knew that was gonna be a challenge. And so like Amanda and Darcy both sort of talking about people giving you tips and hearing things and then. kind of working around the system, I tried my best to talk to as many people as possible who actually worked at Perkins and to get things that I would not have otherwise been able to request myself or for them to tell me, you may not know this, but there is a public record that outlines this policy and it exists here in Comar. I would have never known, you know, to go look there. And so it was a lot of sort of give and take back and forth. And we basically had the story complete. written and I was doing final rounds of phone calls and was able to finally connect with a woman who ended up being pretty central to the story or her family at least. Her name was Martina Morgan and she died at the hospital. I had heard that the circumstances surrounding her death were really disturbing but had not been able to really verify and I couldn't request reports, right? And so I knew Maryland State Police was investigating And I finally was able to get in contact with her mother and the family then got the entire investigative file from Maryland State Police. was hundreds and hundreds of pages that had looked into her death and that really helped shape the story. So it was patience too, things that I wasn't able to get immediately. perhaps the newsroom was so slow at times that it allowed for the public records process to do its job. And I was able to get those records. So it was a lot of give and take working sort of all angles. Yeah. And that makes sense. And I think it's also important to talk about the exemptions to the public records. There are, at least in Maryland's Public Information Act, there's, I think, about 26 exemptions. they're really broad in some ways. And so the idea that public records really are just press a button and 10 minutes from now, you'll get your stuff. Maybe that flies in Florida, but that's certainly not the case in Maryland. Certainly not the case in Delaware or in the district. So we'll talk about that a little bit as well. So Maddie, tell us about the drug companies and opioid use. It's been such a huge burden that Baltimore has been struggling under opioid use. Yeah, and so the public records I used for this story were my favorite kind of public records, which are Court records Court records are amazing because you don't have to go through a public records request process to get them. They are usually just filed openly in court. Sometimes you have to argue in case if there's a ceiling order or something in place, but mostly they're just there for the taking and it's beautiful. I, for this story, I focused on, I had been following for a while Baltimore City is still suing a group of companies for causing or contributing to the opioid crisis in Baltimore. And the city's legal argument goes that Baltimore had been successful in cutting down on heroin overdose deaths, but that when the prescription opioid crisis happened, these companies kind of allowed millions upon millions of prescription opioids to flood the city more than would ever be medically necessary. And they did so kind of knowing that this was an issue, but they just kind of let it happen. That's the city's argument. And that it created, there was this pool of people who were primed to become addicted to prescription opioids. And so it made the problem that much worse in Baltimore. And so as part of that lawsuit, they reached a point that is my favorite part of every lawsuit. It's called summary judgment. And it's the part where both sides have done discovery, they've done all the digging for records that I wouldn't normally be able to get for a variety of reasons. And then they filed them all publicly in court and they put thousands of pages of records on the court record and you can just go read them. And that's what I did. And it was glorious. It was tremendous. So it really helped me like weave a narrative about what happened here. And of course, I had to read thousands and thousands of pages of court records and It did take me like three weeks to get through them all. But at the end, I was able to put together a story pretty neatly and succinctly without even, you know, without having to do a ton of fighting with state agencies, without having to, you know, even talk to a lot of people. Although I did talk to a lot of people to get outside opinions and experts and things like that, but. The records themselves were really the basis for the story. And as someone who's been doing courts reporting for almost 10 years now, that's something that I've really come to value about the courts and that piece of public records and access. Yeah, no, and I think that is something that you said. think court records are a magical, magical place. We're struggling a little bit, I think, across the country with pushes towards expungement, which makes, you know, some types of court records look a little bit lacy or like Swiss cheese because there's just not a complete court record. there is nothing better than the summary judgment because it's all done for you. You just have to read it. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that interplay between sources and records, because in my mind, like the public records are, you know, insomuch as there is truth, like that is the, that is sort of the record. And then sources tend to be more opinion and clarifying. And I wanted to check in, like, do you think that's a, that is on track? Would you characterize it in that way? Or what do you think is the interplay between sources and, and records. And anyone can start, but we should use each other's names since we're all female voices. can start on that, Rebecca. The biggest challenge, one of the biggest challenges in this particular story that I reported was that they just weren't writing anything down. The records, wasn't that the agencies necessarily weren't giving me the records. I mean, they weren't, but it's because apparently they didn't exist because the people in charge of the hospital weren't writing anything down. And so while some of the story was saying this is what we found in these records, other parts of the story were saying this is what should have been in the records but isn't and that's a violation of the law. And I would not have known about it if not for people who witnessed a riot firsthand, for example, in the hospital. When I first asked in the early weeks of reporting on this story last spring, I asked MDH, was there a riot? Pretty point blank, you know, I heard there was a riot, was there a riot? And they said, no, there was no riot. And I was like, interesting. And then I talked to about 10 people who told me explicit details about the riot that did indeed happen on this exact day in this exact unit with this many people, right? And I went back to to Maryland Department of Health and said, hey, all these people are telling me this, like, what do you have to say for yourself? And that's when they realized, oh, my God, the people in charge of this hospital didn't report this in a number of ways. And that is when the health secretary really started to realize what a crisis there was in terms of reporting things. I don't know if that exactly gets at your question, but I do think that, yes, sources can, if they're willing to speak on the record and be named, give quotes, give descriptions of events that happened. But I've also found, and I've spoken with a lot of people, not just in this Perkins story, but in other stories, who wanted to be completely invisible, right? But they were willing to point me to things on the internet I could find, put me in touch with other people who might be able to talk. And so I do think like, it's very rare that you can do a story just off of documents, right? When you can, like summary judgment, because there's thousands of them, that it can be really helpful. I have found in a lot of investigative stories that it's a beautiful mix of all of the above. And so, Amanda, I saw you nodding your head a lot while Katie was speaking. And the one thing that struck me about Katie's comments is like sometimes the absence of records is just as telling as what records are there. But tell us why you were nodding, because it sounded like she spoke to your experience. Yes, absolutely. would say like, oftentimes some of the sources become the purveyor of those records. And I want to harken back to in Delaware Connections Community Support Programs and that provider, which was the largest provider of substance use disorder assistance, as well as mental health and those who are intellectually and physically disabled. So they also were the provider of healthcare in jails for a long time too, in Delaware. And it was because of people speaking up that that whole situation came to be, that we learned that, you know, there were some questionable things going on that they weren't keeping proper records of controlled substances. So it was the whistleblower that really drove like the oversight and accountability of that contractor in Delaware. And our earlier stories before I even started here at the news journal were based off of people talking about their experiences with that provider, whether they were employees or patients or those who receiving care from connections. Certainly, they also can be the driver of those records when the records are either being kept and you can't access them, or in certain cases with going through the bankruptcy and the federal case that they had with the FDA. A lot of that stuff. you weren't going to be able to get access to it until after it's all taken care of, which the bankruptcy, as far as I can tell, it's still going on. So there, there's still threads that haven't been like tied up into bows. So you have to rely on those folks that you build a connection and relationship with to be able to feed you some information so that you're aware of what's going on, especially when those records aren't accessible at the moment that you're reporting on the site. I think that's a great point because it's always a snapshot in time. Things are still developing. Maddie talked about how there's tons more reporting to do on that case because it's still ongoing and in this instance as well. Darcy or Maddie, do you have anything else that you want to add on sources versus sources records and sort of how they weave together? I can jump in. I think from like talking about police misconduct records, I think a lot of times it'll be a source that like tips you off to a specific misconduct record existing. But I think for police, especially, and probably other agencies too, that account that they're doing is their account. And so it opens you up to other sources because oftentimes the police misconduct might involve a member of the public and they might have a totally different accounting of what happened or, you know, witnesses or other forms of public records. Like, you know, maybe it opens you up into getting like the body cam footage or the 911 calls. There's like kind of, it can be both, like that a source tips you off and that a public record leads you to other sources, which is great because Yeah, in that case with police, you don't necessarily want to rely just on the investigation they're doing internally because, you know, they are the police themselves. You kind of want to do as much as you can to verify or fact check or get other people's perspectives. In some ways it sounds like, you know, public records, if you think of them as just another source, you have to cross check all the sources and everyone has their own perspective. And it's a person writing that public record. And I want to hear from Maddie, but then I also want to just check in with you all about what are public records? Because right now in sort of our day and age, when you think public records, you know, I think of like, musty sheet of paper that's handwritten like here's a report but it's so much more. But Maddie talk about because you you deal with a lot of sources and records as well do you want to share anything more about that? Yeah, I just wanted to echo what Darcy said, because I think we treat records as the gold standard of investigative reporting, and they are, and they're wonderful. But it is so important to keep in mind that they can be politicized. They can be written in such a way that they're designed to obscure what really happened. And especially with what we're seeing with the federal government, I think it's not just good idea, but increasingly important to question what we see in the records and make sure that we are cross-checking with human beings and making sure that we are identifying all perspectives on something because a record can be manipulated just like any other source. And I see also like as you're jumping into an investigation that you have to stay so open because all of those sources, all of those records can take you in a million different directions. And so I would love to understand from you all if when you started either in this story or another story you went in and how your opinions or or the ultimate story was shaped or changed from what you started with through public records and sort of the the white swath of what is considered a public record because it's not just the musty old document so anyone feel called to jump in and start there. I can jump in if that's okay. So this was maybe two years ago. I was just reading some very boring reports in the Baltimore Police Consent Decree lawsuit. I guess it's not really a lawsuit, but maybe it is. But I was just reading some very boring reports and I saw a little mention of some backlogs at the crime lab. so I just decided to request a report, to request more records about what had happened there. I knew very little. I just saw the word backlogs and it seemed related to, the police were saying that it was related to their inability to close sexual assault cases. And so I just requested the records. And when I ultimately got the records, This actually kind of goes to what we were just saying. It was very interesting because the police department provided me the records and the records seemed very clearly intended to point blame at the state's attorney's office. And so that's just something that you have to watch out for, but they also helped clarify, you know, and really broaden what was going on. And the problem was that in an effort to... make more gun prosecutions. The state's attorney's office had demanded that the crime lab prioritize gun cases, even if they were gun cases where no one was harmed. And so that meant that murder cases and sexual assaults were being pushed to the end of the line because they were testing like random guns they had found on the street before they were testing anything else. so in that case, the public records, know, public records both in the court record is what tipped me off to what happened. And then the public record that I ultimately got kind of broaden the scope of what happened and helped me really understand the much bigger picture of what was going on, which was really helpful. Who else has had a situation where your thoughts have changed based on the records that were there? Yeah, go for it, Amanda. This is honestly not from my reporting in Delaware, although, you know, there certainly have been records once I get them that I'm like, this is where the story is headed. And I point that out specifically when it comes to North Adams Street and AJ Bacorny and all the drama around the properties that he owned in the Wilmington area in Delaware. But I recall when I was still working in Albany, New York, Specifically, there was an incident where police had responded to like a loud party in a community that was historically black and brown people. And in the police report, they claimed that there was a gas leak. In the police report, police said there was a gas leak. And I had been informed that that was a lie. So I decided, let me just go and contact license and inspections and I'll contact the power company and see if they received any reports. They had not. Ellen and I confirmed that that was essentially a misstatement in the report. Now, unfortunately, I don't know what ended up happening with that report because it's, you know, change in, in, rank and filing. And I ended up covering the state in, in New York after that, but certainly there, there was never any adjudication or resolution on the fact that there had been misstatements in a police report that, you know, for them and the police, allowed them to enter the residence when, you know, they really didn't have a legitimate reason. made one up. actually, and that must be the sadness of being the investigative reporter. Like there's all these things that you could chase down and you could work on, but who has the time to do everything? how do you, you know, how do you kind of make those choices? Cause I see you all nodding, like the one that got away. And I know as an investigative reporter, you probably receive so many tips and people reaching out to you to say, look at this, can you help me with this? So how do you decide what's, what you want to work on or how you can work on things. Ugh, I can take this one. no, you go ahead. I'll make it short. I honestly, like I try to focus on what is like has like the largest impact on our readership in the population and the community that we're talking about. Because there's so many people who will come and they'll be like, I'm, you know, I've been swindled out of a couple thousand dollars because of this contractor I hired to like replace my roof or something like that. And unfortunately, The reality is, like those one-offs that I can't get to them. The reality, I point them in the direction of the consumer protection union. like, I don't know, report it to them. That's going to be your best bet. It's really those larger stories like, hey, a lot of people in Delaware were shocked at their energy bills, like skyrocketing this winter. So, you know, that's where we kind of focus our efforts. It's really where there's a larger impact on the population because if we were always focusing on those individual stories, like we would just never, we would never be able to keep up. Yeah, Katie, what were you going to share? I just, this like keeps me up at night. I nightmares about this, you know, the number of people. I think we have like such a privilege, such an opportunity in journalism to really help people. And I think in local journalism, especially, the path to direct impact is much shorter than on the national stage. And I think that's what's so beautiful about the work we all do and why I've chosen to be a local reporter, even at a national news organization. And I think what with as we've all, I'm sure, experienced fewer resources, we have to make more choices, really hard choices. And I hate it because it means somebody's gonna get left behind and that feels like a power I don't deserve to have. But similar to what Amanda said, I think that I try to think about systems a lot that one-off harm is worthy of writing about and likely somebody will write a one-off harm story. But where I think newspaper journalism specifically and at the post where we have a lot of resources at least still to get documents and records. I try to think like, what is the system impact this can have? That actually helps just crystallize to like, what would your nut graph be on this story? What would your headline be? What is the potential downstream effects of this reporting? And sort of trying to think about it in that ecosystem. But it makes it really, it doesn't make it any easier to like say no to certain stories. And I think if we can be most powerful in journalism when we are thinking about systems, because so often like humans make errors all the time, right? And like often, particularly police departments, they like to explain away misconduct on one bad egg, know, one bad apple. And very often it's not that it is a systems. And so trying to be like, okay, is this one thing representative of a much larger issue? Are you just one in 30 people who got taken advantage of by the bad shady contractor who stole money from you, right? Is the city failing to regulate those bad shady contractors? Probably, know, like sort of like walk up and down that ladder and figure out just how big the scope is. But it's a tough decision for sure. Yeah. And Darcy, I wanted to jump to you because you had that sort of, you know, here's one and it led to many. Yeah, I was gonna build off of that also to say like in terms of balancing priorities, I find it really helpful in the beat that I'm in to like work on longer term stuff that's gonna take more records to get in the background while you're like going out and covering one thing, like carve out time in your day to like follow up on that public record you hadn't heard about and kind of like chipping away at longer things. And sometimes like those longer things might not be something that you've like even pitched yet. You're just trying to like explore a potential story. And that that helps in buying the time that you need because then when you actually like go to your editor and are like, I think I should do this story and it's going to take me out of the mix for a few days or whatever a few weeks. You have like the backing documents to be like, and this is why I want to. do that. So I find that helpful. And that also kind of lets you do some of the longer term stuff that might otherwise be difficult to like carve out time for. And then yeah, in terms of which stories to pick, I think police misconduct records until recently were considered a personnel record in Maryland. And so you couldn't get them. So I've found it really important to chase down the records that I can actually get. so different agencies have different turnaround times in Maryland for that. Like if you're trying to get a police misconduct record. So it's hard to have like the full scope of like, okay, this problem officer exists, like how many cases did they have? like, you can't, it's hard to kind of like see behind the curtain. So I do feel like that's where you really rely on sources and kind of understanding like the full picture as much as possible. behind what you can't see until you get more records, if that makes sense. You're sort of fumbling in the dark until you get enough to make it come in. And Amanda, Maddie, I'm sure you have something to say about this topic, but I wanted to detour into Amanda because Delaware has just gotten police misconduct records to be classified as something other than personnel records. Has that changed your, I know you work on the city of Wilmington, but has that changed sort of your outlook in any way? No. Alright, good, good. So you've been used to getting your records and sources whatever way you can. Yeah, I mean, honestly, sometimes I have to threaten to appeal to the AG in order to get a government entity to fill the request. I'm speaking about the city of Wilmington. When I say that, more than one occasion recently had to threaten an appeal in order to get the records that they had. It's just, you know, transition. I understand that. But certainly we still run up against challenges like my colleague just forwarded over this morning a denial, simply arguing that, this person who had a hearing in the public purview and said they wanted to have a hearing in the public purview after having the hearing in the public purview said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want it to be in the public purview anymore. And I don't quite understand. where they're getting the argument of they can now deny the records from that public meeting because the person said they no longer want it in the public purview. Like, I don't know where the take backsies portion of the exemptions is in Delaware FOIA. I don't think there is one. But again, we experience in Delaware where even though there's like this opening up of records allegedly, we're still going to get government entities and those record, the record holders trying to find a reason to use one of the many exemptions in Delaware FOIA to deny the access. So I mean, like I have to wait and see how this is going to operate in practice in order to have any type of hope or optimism that this is actually going to get us. you know, any, any more information than we previously were able to get. Well, and what a great segue into challenges because actually in Delaware, it's because there's there's three counties, like everything rolls up literally to the AG's office. Like there's essentially one FOIA department. So we talked earlier about how sometimes as a reporter, you can play off of different agencies or different sources of information to kind of, you know, if you're stopped in one point, you go around and try another. Like, I feel like a lot of those avenues get cut off in Delaware because all the roads lead to the same place. And it's very, there's not a lot of sort of ways to dispute. So how do you guys sort of contend with getting shut down? mean, the reporter's life is just rejection after rejection in some ways, but how do you persevere and find other ways? well, I, I tend to just take the road of like, well, I'm going to fight you guys. And if it's a matter of writing a story about how those records weren't accessible when like, and then you outline why you believe it's accessible. I, know, it's kind of just continuing the good fight, but there there's also a lot of grumbling that we reporters in Delaware do just like we're frustrated with. the lack of accessibility in public records, even if it's just that the records exist, they're going to give them to us, but then they say, you have to pay $2,000 in order to receive those records. Meanwhile, they could be provided electronically, which would not require any printing of said records. So why are we charging? And then, I've had experiences where I've requested emails from the Riverfront Development Authority. And while they didn't charge me for the records, they printed out the emails. Single-sided, mind you. I will never forget that, because that didn't make sense to me. You could have provided that in an email. It would have been a lot easier. It would have saved some trees. So all right, the access gets you fired up and you just say, bring it on. And I think there is sort of like that idea of like absence is also a story is totally works in public records. Now, Maddie, know you you're a scrappy person in general. So how do you kind of divert and find what you need? Yeah, I am motivated by pure spite and it fuels me every day. But no, will say so Maryland has a process by which you can challenge denials of public records. You can first go to the ombudsman who is very sweet and overworked and does not have enough time for everyone. And then if that doesn't work, you can go to the MPIA compliance board, which I have done. I'm two for two. I just keep winning. But yeah, it's, mean, part of the problem with the compliance board is that while it can issue opinions in your favor, it doesn't have any enforcement mechanism. And so I received a favorable opinion that ordered the Department of Corrections to provide me with records within three days. It took another 60 days. And that was after I had waited nearly a year. I'm so sorry. It's Annapolis. That's gonna keep going. Let me mute myself for a moment. Well, and while Maddie's muting herself, she's in the press pit at the Annapolis State House, and that is the bell to ring so everyone goes to the floor for breaking an obsession. So Darcy or Katie, do you want to pick up in, go for it, Katie. pick up on Maddie because I know how annoying that bell is and it does go on forever. Yeah, I think that having had the experience in Florida where they have had such excellent public records laws for decades, everybody was trained. They knew the process. They knew the drill. And when Leobre was repealed a couple of years ago and Anton's law was passed and public records from police departments were automatically, know, supposedly more available to us. I realized that there was like a lot of panic throughout these departments on the county level, especially because they just like, they never dealt with this before. And Maryland public records law is written in a way, as we all know, that says you may withhold documents related to an investigation, which many police departments interpret to mean we must withhold documents related to an investigation. And I think the biggest way to fight, I'm from the Midwest, so I try with honey first before I. go full nuclear. I do often also go full nuclear, just to be clear, but to basically be like, you might not understand the law. Let me explain it to you very politely that this is what the law says, silly goose, you know, and they might just be like, are bad. And if they don't, then I will say, and if you don't follow the law, I'll sue you, you know, and then that tends to get them motivated. But I do think that part of our job, unfortunately, is just baseline education. on the records themselves and on the laws and what they say and who among us is more expert on being able to say the holes in our public records laws than us and the flaws of them. And so that's why I always enjoy talking to you, Rebecca, because it's like solidarity on knowing how these laws work and interesting too that we like cover the lawmakers that write these laws and the laws that apply to them. It's interesting web, but okay, Maddie, is the bells done now? You can take back over. is done for now. And I actually wanted to cut in with a question anyway. So those of us who work in Maryland, have any of us actually gotten a full copy of a police misconduct record since Anton Law was put in place? I think maybe I've gotten one. I don't know. Like the Baltimore Police Department, maybe they're not doing this anymore. I haven't gone to them in a while, but they would provide case summaries instead of the actual cases. And they just said it would be, I don't know, too difficult to provide the whole thing. And so I think to date I have only received one actual police misconduct report, despite Anton's law being put in place two years ago. Yeah. Darcy, what about you? Have you gotten anything? think it varies agency to agency. One of the workarounds I found was going through the ACC. got a sheriff's misconduct file that way because I got what they had reviewed and it was final disposition so they couldn't claim it was an ongoing investigation. And sometimes it's like almost like the one the agencies that are complying than are the ones that get written about. So it's kind of like, it's almost like a perverted, like disincentive to actually comply with the law. Like I've written a bunch of stories about Maryland State Police, like troopers, partially because that's the agency that's been giving me the most records. So there's that. I also think just going back really quickly to like challenges and working around them, I totally agree with everyone about the value of fighting. I also think there's value in thinking through other agencies that would have related records, like if a police agency has to file certain reports or report certain things to the state, or if there's a consent decree case, like what can you get through that? Or if a different agency houses like the, like the dispatch log, like so you can see the order of when people arrived, like how you can get around the holdups even while continuing to fight. the holdups. love that. And it is, yeah, you have to take such a big picture view. And a lot of that, you have to know enough of the system to know where the gaps are, where you can, you know, kind of use your little information crowbar to, to pry something loose. I'm mindful of time, because you know, we could talk literally all day on this. But we can't, we'll have to have you all back. I wanted to end with thinking about if you have like a white whale, a holy grail record, that you can't get that you want and how that would affect your reporting. It might be something that you're working on now or something, or maybe you don't have a white whale and that's okay. But I was thinking it might be interesting to know as we, because the Press Association does a lot of lobbying. could, actually my next thing is talking about legislative updates to our membership. So, There's all sorts of things that we're wanting, but from boots on the ground level, what do you guys think should, is the record that you want? Anyone? Go for it, Matty. that critical of a record. It's not going to reveal systemic problems or anything like that. It's just that they're being so annoying about giving it to me that I will not rest until I have this record. I don't wanna go too far into detail about it because I have not written about it yet, but basically I am trying to get... an investigatory record into a police officer out in Western Maryland who was investigated for some pretty serious stuff in 2015. And not only did he never face any charges or accountability, he is now the chief of police in his town. And I know where the records are. They redacted his name out of them, even though under Anton's law that should not be happening. And they claimed that one day before I filed my records request, he sought expungement. of the records, which is not a thing. So I'm coming for them. I'm getting this record. So, you know, it's just, it's that's my white whale just because they have given me such a hard time. It's been like almost a year since I originally requested things if I'm remembering correctly. So I'm getting them. I will not quit until I have it. So that's my white whale. I love it. Okay, well I hope you get your white whale. Anybody else have a holy grail that they want to cheer? It's not Delaware related. I do some freelance work in Pennsylvania. And so I've, I've had a new experience in requesting records in Pennsylvania and the city of Reading is in my crosshairs when it comes to pretty much all of their code enforcement. I don't think they actually do any because their records are not properly kept. And right now I've been trying to get records on their abandoned buildings of which they have been. They have many. They're a city that struggles. You know, a lot of manufacturer and commercial buildings, very empty, crumbling to the ground. And they were like, it's too hard to provide those records. Denied. All right, so I love the creative excuses that come up like, gosh, we'd love to give you that, but just yesterday, expungement, or gosh, that's really hard to keep records of our accounts and things like that. Darcy or Katie, what about you? Yeah, I feel like I have a lot of white whales, most of which are just like pending and haven't been turned over yet. You know what I mean? Like it's a lot of times for me, at least not like a record that they've directly said no to. It's just like waiting for like years for it to actually get to see what you want to see. get you really do have to play the long game I think and that's that's something that people don't always recognize with public records like you know you can have your 10-day turnaround period you're supposed to get it within this time but there's no real repercussion if it's two years rather than two months so that's that's a real so solidarity we're we're waiting with you Katie what about you Yeah, don't, my white whales are less any specific record I'm waiting on, but more sort of conceptual that in Maryland and Rebecca, you and I have talked about this, but there's a big move for expungement, which I philosophically understand, right? As a reporter who has seen and covered the criminal justice system for a decade, I know the ways in which records, court records, criminal records can hamper, hinder a person's ability to move forward with their life. Philosophically, I get it. And also, I hate when public records disappear. And I have many examples where court records that are seemingly low level, a misdemeanor charge there, a misdemeanor charge here, have ultimately led to a really important investigative story that I was able to piece together, right? And so I struggle with threading that needle. of understanding both the, like why lawmakers are pushing for expungement laws and why advocates are doing that. And also knowing that public records are often how I'm able to hold state's attorneys accountable, police accountable, right? Separately, I think that's true of juvenile records, which is, you know, we can't hold, it is much more difficult for us to hold the system accountable. because of the records of individuals being protected. And of course I understand why, of course I understand why. And also another form of protecting kids is making sure that the systems who are supposed to help them are doing their jobs. And that's harder for us to do when we don't have access to records. So I don't have great answers for that, but it is something that I sort of struggle with and... And I'm grateful for organizations like yours to help us thread the needle and know how to advocate for those laws while still understanding their impact. Well, I think that's such a great way to end because what you're all doing in the role of public records is to provide tools to hold systems accountable. wherever, and you're weaving them in with sources, with other types of reporting, but public records really are a huge cornerstone. And in Sunshine Week, we celebrate access to public records. It's flawed, it's challenged, we have our white whales, but without public records, the landscape for... accountability journalism would be radically different. And so I wanted to thank each of you for doing the work that you're doing. It's not easy. It's full of frustration, rejection, know, feeling like you could or should do more. And I really just appreciate that you're slogging through and thank you for coming to spend some time with me today. Thanks for having