Don’t want any arrest, don’t want to be the guest of the sheriff….

    A reporter called today to check to see whether information on who is in jail is a public record.  The paper understands a person arrested has bonded out and wanted confirmation of that fact.  The sheriff is refusing to release this information and has advised the paper that their information on who is in jail is not public information.

    Huh?  This one is pretty basic, folks.  The sheriff is a public body.  The county jail is, I assume, under the custody and control of the sheriff’s department.  I am just certain there’s a record of who is contained therein.  Those records are public records. They are open to the public unless something specific in the law closes those records.  Those are actually administrative records, not “law enforcement” records, I would argue, and therefore the law requires them to be open unless they are specifically closed under an exception in Section 610.021.

    But EVEN if they are law enforcement records, they are records of arrests, NOT “investigative reports” which are subject to closure for certain periods of time.  There is no portion of the statute that specifically closes records on who is in jail, and if a record is not specifically closed under the law, then it’s open.

    Even more fundamentally, the issue of “secret prisons” is a third-world-country issue.  It’s what our founding fathers left Europe to come to this country to avoid.  When we start claiming that the government has a right to arrest people and then not tell the public whether they are in jail or not, we’ve turned our backs on one of the basic freedoms that this country was founded upon.

    Time for this member of a law enforcement agency to do a little reading of the law!