Orlando redactions and area refusals

You could easily see the writing on the wall Monday, as soon as the federal and local authorities in Florida released transcripts of conversations held between police negotiators and mass murderer Omar Mateen. The writing says that a grave error has taken place, with the redactions that keep from public view references made by Mateen to terrorism-related references.

The decision is poorly conceived, and by all appearances is driven by the U.S. Department of Justice, and not the Orlando Police Department. The problem with this decision is that it will fuel for many news cycles to come the conspiracy theories we have all grown weary of, and further politicize a tragedy that should not be politicized at all.

Ostensibly, the nation’s Republican leadership will say the Obama administration is hiding, or protecting, the interests of international terrorism relating to the Islamic State and individuals associated with it. While the leadership tries to distance itself from the rantings of their presumed presidential nominee, the difference between both shrinks. The wall between the leadership and Trump grows ever thin, despite weakly voiced protests against his divisive and often misinformed rhetoric.

The suggestion that the President of the United States somehow is in step with global terrorists, the position voiced in not-so-disguised code by Trump, only gains credence. That suggestion, I should add here for the record, is preposterous and unnecessary. But there are many of our fellow Americans who fall for it, a lot of them right here.

Release of the full transcript, barring tactical information therein which might actually fall under Florida’s public records laws exemptions, would have been the only responsible approach.

That Mateen claimed he was doing this madness on behalf of ISIS is already well known. That cat left the bag a long time ago. These redactions cheat the American public of information essential to digesting the indigestible and making sense of the senseless.

So what does all this have to do with us locally, other than our interest as members of the American community, as consumers of information about the world around us, situated as we are at a distance from Orlando? Why bring this up at all in a column that runs in a very local newspaper?

The answer is that with increasing frequency, we are seeing local government agencies acting in similar ways when it comes to information. The default appears more geared to concealing than revealing.

On various occasions, in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, we have recently seen local government officials refusing to answer questions about criminal investigations and government business. It’s all very subtle, but it’s all very real.

During Mardi Gras, attempts to ascertain who the guns used in a Thibodaux shooting were stolen from met refusals. Officials in several law enforcement agencies directly or indirectly involved refused to release the information, citing one department’s claim that it was related to their ongoing investigation.

Last week, the Houma Police Department declined to identify an auto theft victim – a guy they acknowledged got his car stolen when he stopped to buy some marijuana no less – even though public records laws certainly make clear that absent cause for exemptions, the information should be public.

Two weeks before, the Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government refused to release e-mails received or sent on publicly-owned servers, on accounts owned by the people, citing an obscure opinion of the state attorney general that is not legally binding on anybody.

In short, the propensity for government at many levels to conceal rather than reveal is going unchecked and unchallenged, and now it gets exemplified in a big way by the unnecessary and abusive redactions in Orlando. Maybe people don’t think it’s important when it’s just a little local story here. But maybe they can understand better by looking at a higher profile situation with national implications.

The local message becomes this. If you seek information from local government, which is accountable to you locally, right here, let the newspaper know. Call, e-mail, notify us somehow. We are keeping a list.

The message overall is that the more government at any level conceals, the more potential for government abuse is evident. All of these decisions rip at the core of what good government is and should be.

Florida is blessed with some of the best public records laws in the U.S., but they were run over by the federal government Monday. Louisiana’s public records law, turned into Swiss cheese by revision after revision, in almost all cases counter to open government and disclosure, is in worse shape than it has ever been, and needs to be revisited and reviewed.

The sins, in Orlando or in Houma, are the same, because they grow from the same philosophy, that government knows better than the people it governs, that the people’s access to information is assailable, no matter what state constitutions might hold otherwise. •

Senior Staff Writer​