Like using scribes in the age of the printing press to answer public records requests
There’s something wrong when it takes over three months to obtain a murder listing from the New Orleans Police Department, but you can go to Craig’s List anytime to find a sofa.
Maybe the scribes at the NOPD are overworked, or maybe the city has cut the budget for fountain pens, or maybe the NOPD is out of vellum.
Maybe the NOPD hasn’t heard that there’s this new thing called the Internet. To help those who just got used to using the Selectric typewriter, the Internet has also been called a series of tubes, but that isn’t a very good metaphor for the world-wide web electronic data network.
It shouldn’t take months for the NOPD to respond to a public records request. The current hangup on that request for a complete listing of 2009 homicides is a $150 invoice payable to the NOPD before the list can be released (for which a request to waive hasn’t been answered). Presumably, that’s the going rate for a scribe to produce a new copy of the original listing.
To anyone other than couch potatoes, the ability to track homicides in the city is unquestionably more important than the ability to find a new sofa. So why is it that the NOPD can’t publish something as simple as a listing of murders without being told that it’s vital information to which the public should have easy access?
What explanation can there possibly be for a months-long delay to respond to what is surely a common public records request that should be anticipated? An outside observer from the Gutenberg era might easily be convinced that the NOPD is using scribes in the age of the printing press to answer public records requests.
In the same way that the Government Printing Office was created to use printing presses to disseminate essential federal government information to the public, we now need government at all levels to learn how to use the Internet to improve transparency. And in the same way that FOIA laws guaranteed citizens’ ability to demand public records, we need updated laws to guarantee that the records are made available not as printed documents, but as raw data that can be easily linked, imported, analyzed, charted, and mapped.
One solution is proposed for federal records by Ellen Miller, a champion of government transparency at the Sunshine Foundation: the Public Online Information Act:
If I want to look up most government information, I have to travel to Washington and view it on paper or on the screen of a bulky vintage computer in the basement office of a government building, open only on weekdays from 9 to 5. Or I have to file a formal request and wait for weeks or even months for a response - and this is for government information that is already required by law to be made available to the public. … This new legislation will require Executive Branch agencies to publish all publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in easy to use formats.
It’s time for the scribes and printing presses to be retired.
From now on, records produced at every level of government should be published on the Internet with a presumption of openness, in “complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary, license-free” formats.
Note: No offense intended toward the hard-working, underpaid public servants who answer public records requests as they are authorized. This is a problem caused by failed leadership.
