Transparency News, 6/21/21

VCOG gave a presentation last week, featuring introductory comments from Del. Chris Hurst, on HB 2004, the bill to provide some measure of access to inactive criminal investigative files. We created a website to support the presentation, and video of the presentation (approximately 1.25 hours) is posted there, along with tips and strategies, a feedback form on requests made under the new law and things to watch for moving forward.
HB 2004 resource materials

Recommendations in a new study of the Virginia Parole Board include doubling its size, supplementing its staff and operating with more transparency.  The Washington and Lee University School of Law’s Parole Representation Project’s final report, “Parole in Virginia, 2021,” comes as parole is currently under more fire than it has been in decades.The law school’s final report and parole board critics agree on one thing: The board’s actions need to be more open — something the study says might have curbed the current fire over the Martin case that is teed up as a football in the upcoming statewide elections. “The lack of transparency has been one public criticism of the VPB with some merit,” the study says. “The board’s official silence allowed the facts of Martin’s 40-year-old crime to dominate media coverage, while the public was told little of his decades as a rehabilitated prisoner,” the report states. “A system that never justifies its decisions to grant parole is setting itself up for trouble and may, over time, settle into a defensive and overly cautious mode of operation,” the study says.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Former Rocky Mount police officer Jacob Fracker was fired by the town after federal authorities charged him with taking part in the Jan. 6 riots inside the U.S. Capitol building. Fracker worked as a K9 unit officer, and this spring, he was reunited with his canine partner, a decommissioned narcotics dog named Dorka. Former Rocky Mount police officer Jacob Fracker was fired by the town after federal authorities charged him with taking part in the Jan. 6 riots inside the U.S. Capitol building. Responding to a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, Rocky Mount officials provided The Roanoke Times with documents that show Dorka was sold for $5,000 on March 9 to Rocky Mount Police Sgt. Josh Mason, the former head of the department’s narcotics dog units. Mason has since left the department. Callaway resident Joe Stanley, a gift store owner and veteran Democratic political operative, who has been sharply critical of town officials on several matters, wrote in an email that he would have known about Mason’s purchase of the dog had the town responded to his FOIA requests on the matter.
The Roanoke Times

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, over half of state unemployment websites experienced significant outages as nearly 22 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the span of a few weeks. At the time, part of the explanation for these outages was that many state government agencies had simply never anticipated receiving such a high volume of traffic. Others noted that they were still running outdated systems and had not yet migrated to the cloud. But a year later, many state and local government agencies are back in the exact same position, as numerous government websites have crashed as residents flocked online to make vaccination appointments. Part of the problem was that in the absence of an effective federal solution to the vaccine scheduling problem, each state or local government health agency had to develop its own solution. Another problem was that many states, including California, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, opted to use the same ill-prepared vendor for their online vaccine scheduling system.
Governing

 

There’s no way to separate politics from the debate over actions taken during the pandemic by the Virginia Parole Board, and a subsequent investigation of the board by the Office of the State Inspector General. That’s unfortunate, since a review of the OSIG’s actions released this week provides a troubling view of operations at OSIG that deserves the full attention of the legislature — meaning members of both parties. The commonwealth needs the parole board and the OSIG to work as designed, to follow rules and procedures, and to serve the public, not any political agenda. Getting there promises to be a slog if those in power continue to pull in opposite directions.
The Virginian-Pilot

We get it. The investigator had opinions and stated them in emails and other forms of communication that the law firm examined and cited in the report. Those motivations are proper to question, and it’s also appropriate, as the report recommends, that bias training be provided to investigators at OSIG who are tasked with vetting a wide range of matters throughout the state bureaucracy. But did her supposed biases translate into a false, misleading or incomplete report? There’s a definite possibility that it did, as the Nixon Peabody report suggests but doesn’t verify. Having personal opinions and the reporting of provable facts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Here’s an idea: Why not clear the air and let us know whether the Parole Board, as OSIG alleged, violated state law and its own policies in its handling of not just Martin’s case but those of other inmates who got their freedom early? But when a board that is shielded from disclosing its deliberations and processes under the Freedom of Information Act is accused of cutting corners to release people convicted of ghastly, cold-blooded killings, an honest, unfettered and public accounting of those actions is essential.
Bob Lewis, Virginia Mercury

The New York Freedom of Information Law isn’t particularly long, it isn’t complex, and it isn’t written in difficult-to-decipher legal mumbo-jumbo. Yet day after day, government boards act like they’re trying to translate the federal tax code whenever presented with a request for public information. Public officials don’t flout the law because they don’t understand it. They do it because they don’t want people to know what they’re up to. The most recent example of that comes from the town of Niskayuna, where the town ignored a request made three months ago by a Gazette reporter for documents related to complaints brought in an investigation into two members of the town police department. Didn’t say no or yes. They just ignored the request as if it never happened.
The Daily Gazette

In the decades since the Pentagon Papers, there was a fragile understanding. Journalists would not enjoy specific legal protections, exactly, but they also wouldn’t be prosecuted for leaks. But that balance has been undermined by trends on multiple fronts: the government’s heightened push to expand the boundaries of what information to keep secret; the capacity of leakers to acquire and share information anonymously; the ease of outlets in posting documents and stories immediately; and the dexterity of the government in hunting down reporters and their sources.
David Folkenflik, The Washington Post