passopenrecords.org

Lavin/draft remarks

How do we insure that public officials operate effectively and efficiently? How do we recognize when they do and hold them accountable when they fall short? How do we build trust in government? The free flow of public information, gathered in the name of the public and at public expense, achieves all these goals.

Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the public’s right to know and the ways in which a strong right-to-know law will improve government operations and improve the public’s confidence in their public officials.

I will talk about examples from Philadelphia, including public information requests we made to the Department of Human Services, the Philadelphia Schools and the Philadelphia Police Department. In each case, our requests were denied. I will explain that we were also denied basic information we sought from PennDot about Pennsylvania bridges, information that was available in other states about bridges in those states. Inadequate right-to-know legislation in Pennsylvania means that bridge safety information is not available to Pennsylvania residents. And I will show that these are not isolated problems. A statewide survey conducted by more than 50 news organizations made clear that even our current very weak right-to-know law is often ignored, with few consequences for the public officials who refuse to provide public information to the public.

The people who need a strong right-to-know law can’t always make it to a legislative hearing. But the people who need a strong law are dependent on the people in this room.

Seaser Tiller won’t benefit when you improve the law, but there are other Seaser Tillers out there. Seaser was 9 months old when he drowned in a bathtub in Northeast Philadelphia. His mother had left him to check email. The family was under active DHS oversight. As The Inquirer reported in a June article about DHS failures, Seaser Tiller got lost: “DHS knew the 9-month-old boy might be in danger. His mother, September Tiller, had a history of abusing and neglecting her children.”

The Department of Human Services is now trying to improve the services it provides the most vulnerable children, children like Seaser Tiller. Why? Because of a series of articles The Inquirer has published since fall about a string of deaths of children in families receiving services from the department. To report those stories, we asked the city for a list of all fatalities of children from families receiving DHS services. They said no. We asked for copies of the agency’s reports analyzing the deaths. They said no. We asked for summaries of the recommendations made after each death was reviewed. They said no. Our intrepid reporters pushed and dug and came up with the material on their own, and their articles describing egregious conditions under which many children died won a national award. After our articles, the Mayor pushed out the top two people at the agency, named a review panel, and instituted new procedures.

The new procedures were not in place in time to help Seaser Tiller. If a stronger state law had made it possible for the Inquirer, and our readers, to learn about failures at the agency more quickly, the changes might have saved Seaser Tiller. If you make necessary improvements in the law, those who will benefit most will not be the people in this room – they will be the other Seaser Tillers who are out there, dependent on public agencies to keep them safe.

There will be other Bryan Jones, too. On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Jones, who was unarmed, was fatally shot by police officers in Philadelphia. The attorney for his family, Bruce Ginsburg, has been frustrated by the department’s unwillingness to turn over basic information. Was Jones shot in the back of the head or in the face? We don’t know. “We don’t even know the name of the police officers who shot him,” Mr. Ginsburg told The Inquirer.

The job of the human services department is to protect vulnerable citizens. Our police department is also there to serve and protect. Police officers have a dangerous job and the government provides them with lethal equipment and specialized training. The state authorizes police officers to use lethal force under very specific circumstances. The use of lethal force by a uniformed officer is one of the most consequential actions a government official can take. By rights, such a step should also be among the most scrutinized actions of government. But the department’s refusal to make public information public makes that impossible.

In 2006, 20 people were shot dead by Philadelphia police officers. This year, the pace has continued. Who are the officers involved? What has their career trajectory been? Do they have personnel files full of commendations or full of warnings? We have asked the Philadelphia police department for the names of the officers. The department denied our request. When a government employee as part of his official duties kills a person on the street, should the people have a right to know the name of that official?

Another persistent problem involves government-financed reports examining the operations of public agencies. The school district of Philadelphia knew it had a problem with violence against teachers. An independent consultant studied the situation and completed a 47-page report. We asked for that report, but the district refused. Not until months later when students attacked Frank Burd, a teacher at Germantown High School, and we said we would write a story saying the report was being kept secret, did the district release the report. It concluded that a lack of training, inconsistent discipline practices, and high turnover in personnel all led to a breakdown in procedure. Problem students who should have been transferred to special schools were left in regular classrooms. Belatedly, the district made changes. This may help other teachers, but it came too late for Mr. Burd. That attack broke his neck. He is still recovering.

Time after time, reporters, community groups, or curious citizens find themselves frustrated when they ask for information in Pennsylvania that would be readily available to the public in other states. Bridge inspection data is a recent example. In Iowa, the state Department of Transportation website lists every bridge, the year it was built, the year it was reconstructed, and the score it received on a “sufficiency rating.” In Pennsylvania, our department of transportation seems to think the public is not ready for this information. Our bridges are rated only on a pass-fail basis – either sufficient or insufficient. The full scores of the Iowa bridges are available to the public. The full scores of our bridges remain secret.

In 2005, 50 newspapers in the state along with The Associated Press conducted a survey of 700 agencies. Of 217 police agencies, 40 percent denied access to logs or incident reports. Of 130 school districts, half denied access to the employment contract for the superintendent. The law’s requirement that a local agency must respond within five business days was routinely ignored. Why do citizens want to know about police activity in their communities? If there is a pattern of break-ins or carjackings or attacks against women, people need access to that information so they can protect themselves.

Officials say no so often because they can say no with impunity. Substantial penalties, including legal fees, must be part of any right-to-know law that will be taken seriously. We have seen that there is a human tendency to keep information out of the public’s hands. A strong law will mandate penalties when that happens.

These public records belong to the public. For a democracy to function smoothly, citizens need access to public information – to their information. That is why the First Amendment was written. That is why you are working so hard to write better right-to-know legislation.

If the legislature is able to improve the law and this information becomes more readily available, how will news organizations use it? Our civic responsibility is to provide news and information to the public, to gather the facts, to explain them clearly and to act in a timely way to make accurate information available. Today, that means putting it on a website, carefully labeled and sorted. Any legislation that restricts how information can be used – especially with an undefined ban on commercial use – would be a setback, not an improvement. The Philadelphia Inquirer is not just a newspaper; we distribute news and information over cell phones, in emails, on websites, and in print. A carefully written right-to-know law will recognize how information flows today. It will also recognize that there are many Seaser Tillers, and Bryan Jones, and Frank Burds out there who are counting on you to do the right thing.

Thank you,

Carl H. Lavin
Deputy managing editor,
Philadelphia Inquirer