Florida law requires not only that these requests be processed without unnecessary delay but they require the agency to "promptly" respond recognizing that they have received the request. To this day I have never heard from the person to whom that email address belongs. I have even emailed them asking them if they were not the right person to handle such requests. Not a single response in a week and a half.
Frustrated this past Monday, April 9th, I again began inquiries with the Police Department as to who handled public records requests and I learned that there was a group of officials known as "public information officers." I obtained an email address from them and resubmitted my requests.
One set of records that I was requesting were surveillance videos from the Station. The difference is that I was seeking those that pick up where the ones we have already seen leave off and take us through Zimmerman's presence to his ultimate exit as a free man.
I believe there are many things of interest on these videos but primarily I was working with a hypothesis that the explanation for the seemingly inexplicable actions of the Police and State Attorney, in their release of Zimmerman, was their treatment of him as "one of them." I argue that as Neighborhood Watch Captain, a program administered by the Sanford Police, his actions were treated much as they would the actions of a police officer who discharged his firearm and killed a civilian. In their culture it is not the rights of citizens that is most important but the immunity of the official from being held accountable for their actions. This, I argue, can explain what is otherwise inexplicable. Even more inexplicable now that we have heard the 911 tapes, seen the other videos, and read the Affidavit.
When I told the person on the phone what kind of records I was looking for they asked me if I was referring to the videos that had been played in the media. Yes, I explained, but not the same ones.
"We won't be able to give you those," I was told. They were exempt, they claimed, from the public records law according, they said, to the State Attorney, Angela Corey. I asked if they were actually claiming that not only the additional videos I sought but the ones that had already been released were exempt from the law. "Yes," I was told.
The problem with this is that only records specifically declared by the legislature, in a statutory enactment, are exempt. All other records are public. And there was no statutory exemption for these videos. More significantly even if these were not ordinarily public records another well established aspect of the Public Records Law is that once a record has been released into the public it cannot later be declared exempt. Thus the videos that we have all already seen certainly could not be withheld from the public.
I then made my public records requests, including for the videos, to the public information officers via email. And then I waited. And waited. And I got no response.
Then I made an additional request. This time for the policies and training manuals associated with the Neighborhood Watch program. And I got a fairly "prompt" response. They pointed me to two documents which were left up on the City's website and were not being withheld. They were the documents provided to the civilian participants in those programs.
I then sent them an email following up, thanking them for providing those records promptly, but realized that perhaps they had not given me all the records I was looking for. I asked if there were no policies of the department that dealt with how its officers or staff were to deal with this program.
That was the last I heard from them. Along with the follow-up request I have yet to receive even a response acknowledging receipt of the requests -- as is their obligation under the law. It has been nearly two weeks.
So I again called this time knowing I needed to be put through the Public Information Division. One of its members received my call. I was inquiring, I informed them, about several requests and was concerned that maybe they had not received them. The person on the other line was reluctant to say anything concrete about anything. I had to explain that I was worried that my email was not working before I got a subtle indication of affirmation that, at least, they had received the emails. But absolutely no response as to when I was going to get the records.
So even as the attorneys are preparing to jointly seek the unprecedented action of a Court to turn off the Public Records Law for a period of time and "seal the public records," as Zimmerman's Attorney Mark O'Mara raised today -- the records have already been effectively withheld, contrary to law, by his counterpart Angela Corey.
I even learned when I went to Corey's office to request a copy of the Affidavit and to be given the explicit statutory basis for any redaction that the unidentified person with the email above is with a State Attorney's Office (although not necessarily hers) -- as the email address I was given for this request also ended in a .doj which would not have been an email address of a member of the Police Department.
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