How To File A Public Records Request

PRA Teach-In Presentation Files Download

Transcript:

Jamie: 00:02

Hi, I’m Jamie and I’m with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Today, we’re going to do a teach-in on how to file your own Public Records request or Freedom of Information Act. We’ll go through a slideshow together and some documents to explain a little bit about what a Public Records request is or Freedom of Information Act, and how it would be useful in your organizing in your local area against your police department. So, I’m going to go into a slideshow right now.

Jamie 00:43

So, like I said, I’m with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and we’re a coalition that is grounded in Los Angeles, California. Our home office is in an area that’s called Skid Row. Skid Row is known as one of the most policed areas in the nation. It is a predominantly Black community and a community where there is an extensive amount of people who don’t have homes. It’s also a very poor community, where we’ve known that police surveillance–spying and infiltration–is of great levels. So, in our organizing, we organized to dismantle any type of state sanctioned surveillance. And we have utilized what is called a Public Records request or Freedom of Information Act to help us dismantle various programs. Today, I’m going to walk you through why or what public records request is, and why you should find one and how it can help in your organizing against law enforcement.

Jamie 01:47

Before I get into the mechanics of it, I wanted to talk a little bit about what the coalition’s work is. We started off the coalition in the summer of 2011, and our campaign that launched the coalition was against the Suspicious Activity Reporting Program. Now, this program was a statewide and nationwide initiative that’s also international, that basically allowed officers to collect secret files on people for using photography in public, videography in public, drawing in public, asking a business its hours of operation. And so when they write up this report–because you seemed like you were “suspicious”–they define “suspicion” as this observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning, of criminal or terrorist activity. What we saw was the burgeoning in (this was in this this campaign was launched in 2011, but Suspicious Activity Reporting was launched in 2008) really one of the first versions of surveillance and the changing nature of policing into counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactic within domestic law enforcement.

Jamie 03:04

What you’re looking at is a pop-ed tool or popular education tool that we use to show people the different types of surveillance technology that we knew at that time that LAPD was using. But what we’ve done is we’ve utilize the Public Records request or Freedom of Information Act to gather more information from law enforcement about what type of surveillance technology they’re using. So at the top of the circle, you’ll see SAR which is “Suspicious Activity Reporting”; “IWatch” which is the companion program to “See Something Say Something” program; IGG the “Intelligence Gathering Guidelines”. And it goes on and on “Predictive Policing,” “Trapwire,” “Stingray,” “DRT,” “Automatic License Plate Readers,” “Drones,” “High Definition Cameras,” “Body Cameras,” “Fusion Centers.” So part of our fight was really to expose. Now, the way we see this is that our primary goal here isn’t to fight for ordinances or for new mandates that force police agencies to be transparent. Transparency or the tactic of forcing exposure of policing technology is just a tactic for us in a goal and our main goal being abolition and the absolute dismantling of any types of state sanctioned surveillance, buying or infiltration, and ultimately, law enforcement.

Jamie 4:29

So, we have Guiding Principles that not only guide how we organize, why we even organize and use public records requests, but guide how we see law enforcement and our fight against law enforcement. So we see this kind of idea of police and policing of our communities is not a moment in time but a continuation of history. Now we know that police basically are an extension of slave patrols back in back all the way to the time of chattel slavery, at that time police were used to capture runaway slaves. We see that police were also used to enforce Jim Crow and segregation. Police are also a part of the war on drugs, the war on gangs. And now, in present day we see how police operate in the war against terror. And it’s in the war against terror, that a lot of surveillance technology and the way that surveillance is being inundated into our communities is really under the guise of “terrorism.”

So, in speaking of that, our second guiding principle is realizing that policing always legitimizes itself by creating another by creating something that needs to be policed. And so like I said, when we think about the ushering in of new surveillance technology, it really was under the guise of a “terrorist,” “terrorist Muslim.” But there was also the “savage Native,” right there was also the “criminal black person.” There was also the various different types of discriminatory practices that law enforcement use to basically deem their presence in our community necessary.

So the third principle, I think being so important is that de-sensationalization of the rhetoric of national security. Now this is what I feel like the public records request really has helped the coalition kind of expose is that demonstrating that even during a time right now of this kind of heightened war on terror of this need for surveillance technology in our communities, we know through public records requests and through this kind of exposure of the different types of programming, that LAPD–which is our local law enforcement, the Los Angeles Police Department–is using, we’ve realized that it’s really not about “counterterrorism,” that a lot of these programs are really about the same policing that it’s always been about: the policing of poor black and brown people. So really, I think when we get to know and we get to understand what these programs are, and how they operate and who they’re targeting, we realize this has nothing to really do about national security or counterterrorism.

And then also our fight is anchored in human rights. We see that a lot of folks enter into this kind of idea and realm about surveillance in kind of this idea of protection of privacy, but because the coalition’s home base is located in Skid Row–a place where there is a large unhoused population–we realize that when you don’t have a home, the idea of privacy is something that’s not a privilege. It’s not something that you relaxed and it’s not something that you just have and that you can assume access to. Because your lives are constantly buried on the streets, you’re constantly being seen, constantly don’t have the protection of a home that allows you to move and breathe freely. So our fight really, when we look at surveillance, is anchored in seeing that we have the right to live our lives without the constant harping and constant watchful eye of the state. So I shared a little bit about the background of the coalition because I think it’s really important to see, in context, why and how communities file public records request and why and how communities can utilize public records requests to build power and to fight against racist harmful policing.

Jamie 8:57

So what is a Public Records Request or a Freedom of Information Act–also known as a PRA, or a FOIA, you’ve often heard those terms before. So a public records request or known as a CPRA in California is a state law that is particular to California. So, the California State Legislature adopted the Public Records request act in 1968. It was designed to give the public access to information in the possession of public agencies. So the police department is a public agency. So it’s kind of like a sunshine law. So because we pay taxes, because we’re part of the California State, we’re allowed to request documents from any public agency that receives our funding, receives our money, receives our resources, and we’re allowed to ask “What are the inner workings of your department?”. They don’t have to produce a new document for you, you have to–and this is kind of the trick of a public records request–is that you have to request for documents that that already exist. And we’ll get into that a little bit. And then if you don’t have a records request law in your state, there’s also a federal law, which is called the Freedom of Information Act. It’s a federal legislation that was adopted in July 4 of 1965, that grants public access to documents or other data in possession of a government agency or public authority. So you either have the Public Records request or a Freedom of Information Act so you can find that out through a simple web search.

Jamie 10:43

So, why file a PRA or FOIA? I’m a community organizer. By trade, I’m a nurse. So everything I’ve learned about community organizing, about law enforcement, about why I’ve chosen to fight against law enforcement has been because of the organizing I do on the ground, the books (that within my community) that we’ve read, my own personal experiences in my life in experiencing law enforcement. When I came into wanting to file a public records request–which is like a legal document–I immediately was like, “Well, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t have any experience in this. Why am I capable? Or why would I file one?” So I knew that I needed to build community power, and I needed to build the skills to be able to continue that power to see what what law enforcement was doing, and I didn’t necessarily have access to a lawyer at that time, or lawyers–especially community based lawyers–are always so busy with other lawsuits and don’t necessarily [have time]. If you don’t have the funding to pay a lawyer to file something like this for you, it’s a skill that you need to build, also to build a culture of resistance and self reliance.

Jamie 12:11

And again, the knowledge that you build, the knowledge that you gain, from receiving documents from the agency, from a police department are absolutely horrifying yet absolutely empowering because then you actually start to see the inner workings, the imagination, how they’re mapping your communities, how they are using different tools and tactics, how they’re speaking about you. And that really kind of invigorates the culture of resistance where you understand how these programs are actually targeting you. And then also to expose the policing tactics because a lot of times even in this day and age around data-driven policing, so much of the focus is–right now especially in LA–is constantly about police building relationships with community. They’re always talking about community policing: “how we want to get to know you, we want to be able to serve you better.” But what they’re not talking about is the massive amounts of infrastructure they’re building–of data and technology they’re building–in order to trace and track community members and how they are using that data. Nor are they talking about how there is flaws in what they’re executing as well. So it’s really important to use this tool to expose what they’re doing. And then also, again, just to clarify, transparency as a tactic, and not the goal of abolition; abolition is the complete dismantlement of policing. So these are some reasons why the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition files Public Records request. It’s really a journey about mapping. It’s a journey about discovering exactly how the logistics behind policing and then building that community power and building that community resistance and that skill and self reliance to take on a fight like this. So finally, a public records request is really [a tool]. When we think about it as a tool for community building, we need to get out of the mindset that this is just something that a lawyer does for us, that this is something that the lawyer does to aid a community group and that they’ll go through the documents for us and that they will figure out where the violations are, and that the public records request will possibly be used in a lawsuit to help them gain a win of some kind of civic nature, which is always absolutely important, absolutely necessary. But what are the other reasons and steps and processes behind filing a Public Records request?

Jamie 15:07

I think going back again, to what I was saying it’s really about us building that community power. So in order to build that community power, you need to have steps where you’re engaging the community where it becomes a process where the community is involved, the community is participating, the community is actively going through documents. So one of the things to ask yourself right away is, “what can I publicly find out about an issue?” So before you actually sit down with community members, and decide what technology you want to learn about, what issue that police department or tactic or tool they’re using that you want to know about. You want to ask yourself, “what publicly can I find out about that?” And so I’m going to walk us through an example and this was an example that the Coalition used. Or this is an example from the coalition’s history in our fight against predictive policing, particularly a program called Operation LASER.

Jamie 16:10

So before we filed the Public Records request, there was a lot of community-based research and study that we did to find out “what did we know about this program publically?” We actually filed a public records request. So we wanted to look at what the existing research was–academic articles, media, judicial actions, what work had been done on this issue of predictive policing for the example–before we actually wrote the Public Records request. And we spent quite a bit of time, almost six months, just talking and people would bring in news articles, people would bring in academic books, we would see other research that was being done on predictive policing. And then the second point that I’m talking about is how did we share it with our larger community? We had meetings, every fourth Tuesday of the month, we had a collective meeting that was located in Skid Row at Los Angeles Community Action Network, where we talked about predictive policing, where we shared these news articles, and we built a collective knowledge and analysis around on predictive policing. And then we eventually had to ask ourselves, “what did we want to know?” Also, you want to ask yourself, “have I asked folks why they need to know this information? Or why is it important to them?” Because part of the community process is really making this information relevant to your life. And that was a very difficult part about predictive policing is that predictive policing, and the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence, risk assessment, data, and data analytics made it seem like it was this like chasm between ourselves and the community that almost seemed irrelevant because everybody could feel the boot of policing. But all this data and technologies just seemed almost irrelevant. And so we had to talk about: why was it important for us to understand this issue? Why was it important for us to get these documents? Why was it important for us to you know, fight for information with LAPD about about obtaining these documents?

Jamie 18:38

So who were we that did it? I really wanted to take a moment and just pause and show a photograph of who we were during that time, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Who we were–we were students. We were residents of Skid Row. We were parents. I’m a nurse, like I said, and we were community organizers, and we were community members. And there’s not one person in this photograph who was a lawyer. And it’s not that lawyers don’t have a place, but it’s to really make the argument and the point about this particular teach-in is to really demonstrate that anybody can do this work, that anybody can file a Public Records request that we should be filing these because we should be knowing what the inner workings are of law enforcement.

Jamie 19:34

So what is the role of community and what is the role of lawyers? I’m going to read these bullet points just real quickly. The community submits the PRA and communicates to the police department. The community updates each other about what the police department is saying in regards to the Public Records requests, and the community works through the documents. My last point here is that lawyers are not always necessary to move this work along. So when we break it down a little bit, [for] submitting a public records request, there’s definitely many templates that you can find online that have the boilerplate language in regards to what you need written on the public records request for it to be formally submitted in the language that your state requires you to. There are several ways that it’s submitted. Before the example, I’m going to show you here in a minute, it was filed through an email. We emailed the Discovery section of the Los Angeles Police Department and we also hand delivered the Public Records request to the department’s Discovery section. Currently now, a few years later, the city of Los Angeles has electronic filing and so now you actually go to a portal and a website, and you actually type in your Public Records request and you submit it to the Los Angeles Police Department, and the city electronically sends it to them. You actually can log on to the website and keep track of your Public Records requests that way. Now, community updates. In this process–whether it’s electronic or whether it’s through email–that process of getting updates from the police department to you is you’ll have a point person and that point person will receive the communications and it doesn’t have to go through a lawyer. So that’s a really important point to know that you don’t need a lawyer that tells you know, that’s going to basically mediate that communication between you and the police department. And then And then secondly, what starts to happen is that normally, the waiting period is two weeks, at least in California. And so you’ll have to check your local, you know, state regulations. But there is a mandated amount of time where the department, the police department is required to respond to you. And so in Los Angeles, there’s a two week period that they have to legally respond to you. And so, or what they’ll also do is they can set up a time period of when they will respond to you, and they can send a message saying “we’ll respond to you on September 29.” And that will be the response date that they are obligated to to follow if they don’t follow up with you that can put them into legal trouble. And oftentimes, that is a very good tool to use as well because you’ll see an example I’ll show that that actually is what got LAPD in trouble with our records request that we filed in May of 2017. And then once you do get to receive documents, it’s not necessary for a lawyer to go through those documents. Now remember all the steps before, we talked about researching the issue before you filed a public records request. We talked about community meetings about what you were understanding what what what you knew about the issue, and this one was predictive policing. And then we talked about that, that, you know, relevancy, you know, why is it relevant in my life? And why do I need to know about this issue so much. And so that’s why lawyers are not important at this point. Because if you understand the issue, you have community that’s discussing this issue. And now that’s relevant to them. This issue is relevant to them. You will have folks who are ready to go through these documents with you because you have built that community power. And so the community will work through those documents.

Jamie 24:09

So I’m going to get into the example, from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in May 2017 public records request about Operation LASER. Operation LASER is a predictive policing program that’s now dismantled because of community driven fight and effort to dismantle this program. We were successful. It was a predictive policing program that worked in two folds. It worked to predict who would commit crime and where crime would be committed. And this is a quote that was out of one of the public documents that we were able to find about Operation LASER that spoke of the program as being “analogous to laser surgery were trained medical doctors use modern technology to remove tumors.” So that was the language and the imagination around this program. So I’m going to stop screen sharing right now because I want to pull up some documents.

Jamie 25:05

This is the original Coalition’s public records request that we filed. Now public records requests when you do file them. And here you can see where we filed via email to the discovery section and we handle the public records request. You do not get charged to file the public records request, not in California. And again, you have to check your local police departments because this is where things get tricky, because for us because we’re a public agency, and I’m going to scroll down here, there’s often a surcharge. The government is allowed to charge on only the cost of copying materials. And then we see as the coalition is “I’m requesting you to waive all applicable fees associated with this request, is I believe this request is in the public interest and not for commercial use.” So these are the kind of tricks you’ll have to figure out how to work through per city and state that you’re in. Because in California, we don’t have to pay to submit and we can waive if we are working within a community. And that’s why I’m saying like when you’re a community org, and you’re working to dismantle policing for the greater good of humanity, for your local community, for yourself, that is in the public interest and so therefore, there should be no fees for that. We want to know and in general, there should be no fees at all right? But this is some of the boilerplate language that you can use to avoid those fees. One thing that the city has done is by moving towards being electronic, though, is that we have not experienced any attempts yet to charge us with any type of fee as of yet. In this public records request, I want to move down just a little bit to the actual request. So this was in regards and you’ll see that this was via email hand delivered to Los Angeles Police Department Legal Affairs Division discovery section regarding LASER and “to whom it may concern pursuant to the Public Records Act”–so very boilerplate language and if you want to email to [Coalition’s email address], we can send our public records requests. Also, in building our archive, we are making our public records requests available to the public to also use and copy. This is the language right here: “I hereby request the following records.”

Jamie 28:27

So I want to tell a little story about this one, because we engage the community and we literally sat together in a room and typed out what we wanted. What did we want to know? And here, you’ll see that we wanted grant applications, any kind of imagination as to how did they start to develop this program? What monies did they apply for? And then we wanted charts relevant to the evaluation and analysis and implementation to this program. So we wanted charts related to the evaluation analysis and implementation. So here we basically can’t name the document, but we want all the documents and charts that are related to evaluation and analysis implementation. So you know that if there’s a program that exists. They have to be analyzing it. There has to be something around their implementation of it, their evaluation of it. So you can also, you know, when you think about what you’re trying to get, and what we wanted to know, was not only how was it developed, but what was the process of its implementation? We wrote that straight into the public records request. We also had done research and we knew that there was a smart initiative policing project in group because we had looked into LAPD prior to filing this public records request and we knew that LAPD had started its own focus like its own kind of subcommittee around what they call the Smart Policing Initiative Project and group and they were in charge of creating LASER. So then we specifically named them and said we want all their reports because we know this group exists. And then we wanted the divisions a list of all the divisions currently using LASER now this is interesting. See, this is where LAPD decided to but after a push (because I’ll get to that part of the story), this is a little bit of a faux pas in this particular public records request because if this list didn’t exist prior, they don’t have to recreate that list for you. So to list all of LAPD’s divisions currently using LASER program–that doesn’t necessarily exist so they don’t have to create a new document for you. And then again here, we did the list. And so my point in pointing out this kind of mistake here in this public records request is that we still learned from the process because LAPD said we don’t have to create a list for you. But they did in good nature because we push them a little bit and they did list some things for us. And so then here is the very big last one: “any and all chronic offender bulletins created by the Los Angeles Police Department from the inception and to the date of the laser program.” Now, chronic offenders were how LAPD labeled people that they believed were going to commit crimes. Now in reading the original public document about the LASER program. We found out they called these people “chronic offenders” and that they created documents called “chronic offender bulletins.” So because of doing that prior research, we were able to specifically ask for the bulletins because we knew the bulletins existed. So that’s an example of how we wrote our own PRA. We made some mistakes in the process, but we still were able to push things along right. So, what was the communication process after that?

Jamie 32:22

So this is some a copy of some of the emails that we that we had sent back and forth. And so here it shows to the person from Discovery, “We are writing in reference to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition CPRA, dated May 10 2017, which is attached.” We received a response on June 6, saying 14 days–see that 14 days I was telling you about–and we had attached that it’s been six weeks since the last communication, we’d appreciate it if our requests for public records can be resolved with immediate effect. So he responds, “we have not received a response to our request yet. We’ll check on the progress of your request.” And that was from Leroy Beavers. And so then he later responds right away saying “department which handles this research has requested an extension. The delivery date is July 29, 2017. If you have any questions, please contact me.” So we have these back and forth communications, and we were reporting these back to the community. What ends up happening is that LAPD goes silent until February. And they don’t start talking in February just because they decided to. But because by February they had not responded to our public records request, we were in our right place to be able to file a public records lawsuit against them, for completely failing to respond to the public records requests, for completely failing to communicate with us that they needed more time or that something was going on or that they were working on our request.

Jamie 34:09

So now this is where the transition happens. Because obviously, like I said, we weren’t lawyers that were working on this. This is where the community lawyering comes into effect. This is why organizing and building networks within the community are so important and why so many of our community lawyers are so appreciated is that we had built a close relationship with a lawyer who was willing to do work pro bono for us. So for free, a lawyer came in and said, “I will write your public records request, your petition basically saying that they have ignored your request.” And and this is what I’m showing right now. And so they they wrote this petition for us, basically stating to the courts, why it was in the public interest that not only did LAPD violate the public records request law or act, but that it was also in the public interest that they fulfill this public records request. So we spent a lot of time with our lawyer talking to them about the program, educating them, sharing knowledge about it, and they were able to basically write up this summary of allegations right in here. This goes into talking about the Los Angeles Police Department’s LA Strategic Extraction and Restoration program, a person-based predictive policing program. They were able to basically kind of make that case, which we helped to shape and we help to tell them why, and they filed this petition for us. So you’ll see here, the background how we filed it in May of 2017. And then they have the exhibits which are down here. They’re attached to the petition. Here they are the original public records request.

Jamie 36:31

And then the first letter that we had received back from LAPD because they had first responded in June 6, and then the emails that they had later sent to us being very well aware that we were waiting, and then there’s this the the next email, and so, that gets filed and then that’s where fees do incur so at that point, we did have to pay the court to file the petition. So again, this is why it’s so important that when you are doing this work against law enforcement, that you’re building community, that you’re building community knowledge, you’re building community relationships, and that it’s relevant to people in the community why this information is so necessary because then the resources come. You can fundraise for the money, you can get community lawyers, and they’re out there that do this really great work and file petitions for you, especially when you have done that work of really explaining why it’s relevant not only to you and to your community members, but even to the lawyer for this information to be public knowledge. So, what happens next?

All of a sudden, right, March 9, LAPD completely bypasses our lawyer and sends the coalition an email and document dumps, which means they just give us tons of documents and they fulfill the request. So here, here’s is a letter from the discovery section. And this is their request number one talking about all the documents they’re giving us in regards to request number one. Request number two, they fulfill and I want to show you, here’s where it says “here request number three does not reasonably describe an identifiable public records. The department does not have a smart policing..”–This is not this is not a good example. They did and we fought them on that. There is one that I want to show you where they say they don’t have to create a list. Okay, here it is.

So this is the example so “here’s the department does not have such a list.” Remember when we asked them to list all the departments that were using Operation LASER. It says here, “the department does not have a list. And the CPRA does not require it to create a new record to respond.” But now mind you, we filed that lawsuit. So now they’re trying to look good in the eyes of the court, and so, they listed anyways for us.

And so that’s why taking no for an answer or not asking it sometimes is a risk because you don’t want your public records request to be frivolous and for them to just ignore it completely. But sometimes you can take that risk and just ask, and depending on the pressure that you’ve built in the community and that organizing that you’re doing that goes along with a public records request and makes it more powerful, you may get the answer you’ve asked for. And we got it. We ended up getting the answer. So they do this. And so of course, LAPD is like “your law suit is mute. See you later when I’m going to see you in court.” But we’re like, “Hmm, maybe not so fast.” So what we do is we go, “okay,”–and this document I’m just going to show is that this is a document of an analysis that the community did of the actual records–So, we go “okay, we got all these documents, this is what we got.”