Gaining access to an arrest report in Barrington

by Kathleen Odean

Just for a few minutes during the month of April, 2001, Barrington reminded me of those countries where police make arrests and citizens aren’t supposed to ask for the details. I had read a brief description in the Barrington Times about an arrest near my house and I wanted to know more, so I stopped by the police station and asked for the initial arrest report. The woman in uniform, who I later learned was a dispatcher, asked if I was one of the parties involved. When I said no, she said I couldn’t get it and that they don’t give out arrest reports “to just anyone.”

In fact, under Rhode Island law, an initial arrest report is a public record, which means that “just anyone” — which is a good description of who we mean by “the public” — can have it. More than that, you don’t have to say who you are or why you want it. It’s not up to the police to decide if you have a good enough reason.

I told the uniformed woman that I understood it was a public record. Visibly annoyed, she told me she needed my name. When I replied that, actually, names aren’t required to get public records, she brusquely referred me to the records window. After a wait, a uniformed man appeared and told me to fill out a records request form, pointing to a pile of papers on the counter. He explained that if I were an involved party, I could get the record now, but since I wasn’t, the request had to go to the public records officer, who wasn’t there.

The papers on the counter included request forms and, under them, a handout about public records. According the Attorney General’s Web site, which I looked at later, police chiefs in Rhode Island have agreed to post the information in this handout as a placard at police stations, but in Barrington it was buried under a pile of papers.

I filled out the required information on the request form and gave it to him. “You have to put your name on this,” he said. I showed him that the request form and the handout state that names are optional. “It will take longer to get the record if we don’t have your name,” he told me, but couldn’t explain why.

After more waiting, he told me it would take up to ten business days, if the records officer approved my request. When I asked why it would take ten days for me to get a record that he would give right now to an involved party, he only said, “That’s the law.”

I then thought to ask to see the police log, as I’d heard that’s where newspapers get information. “Oh, no,” said the dispatcher, “That’s part of the record.” I said I thought it too was public (or how could journalists see it?). In a few more minutes, a door opened and another officer told me, with no explanation, to step inside and sit in a small room. I wasn’t sure what was going on — Would they fingerprint me? Take a mug shot? — until I was seated and he handed me a sheet from the computerized police log.

As I looked at the page, the officer said that it wasn’t up to him but if it were, he wouldn’t show me anything without knowing who I was. I considered bringing up police accountability. If the police make the arrests and then decide who can and can’t learn details about them, how can citizens judge if the police are doing their jobs well? How would we know if they respond differently to calls from poor neighborhoods than from wealthy ones? Or if police are following procedures about mandatory arrest for domestic abuse? Citizen access to arrest reports lets us know what’s going on in our community. The legislature considers this so important that there are fines for willful violation of the law.

I asked for a photocopy of the log sheet: Request denied. I returned to the question of getting the arrest report, and he said that no one in the building even had access to it, a contradiction of what the other officer told me.

Finally, I asked for a photocopy of the request form. The form includes a receipt to be filled out by the police and given to the citizen, but perhaps they didn’t know that. The dispatcher reluctantly photocopied the form. As she did, I asked if she’d had any training in public records. “I’m only the dispatcher,” she said, “I don’t know anything about records.” When I observed that she had given me wrong information about getting records, she denied it and said she had only told me to fill out a request form.

“I guess you’re just a confrontational kind of person,” she added before I left. The experience was unpleasant, true, starting from when I said that arrest reports were public, which she didn’t want to hear. Both times that I said my name wasn’t required, the hostility was palpable.

I chose not to give my name even though I have nothing to hide. Lots of people in Barrington know me. But officials should give out public records because that’s the law, not because they approve of who is asking. Why should it matter if I’m local or from out of town? Or if they don’t like the way I look or the ethnic origin of my last name?

Big Brother, though, is hard at work in Barrington. When I finally went to pick up the record, the police had my name in their files and printed it out on my receipt for photocopy costs. I hadn’t given my name, address, or phone number, or called the station. Maybe they ran a check on my license plate.

You might conclude from our Attorney General’s Web site that access to public police records in Rhode Island is no longer a problem. The Web site highlights a June 1999 press release about Rhode Island police chiefs agreeing to standard procedures for public records, some of which Barrington is following. The Attorney General has also distributed hundreds of copies of little booklets about public records laws.

But until the police department staff members who deal with the public stop giving out inaccurate information and wrongly denying requests, we continue to have a problem in this state. Most citizens would probably have taken the dispatcher’s word as true and left without pursuing their request. Press releases and booklets aren’t enough to solve the problem. They were a start, but more needs to be done to ensure that citizens actually — not just theoretically — have unencumbered access to public records in Rhode Island.

Kathleen Odean, a writer and librarian, lives in Barrington, R.I.