St. Louis Judge Rejects Police Effort to Withhold Public Records

Sunshine laws exist for a reason—to ensure governments aren’t operating in the shadows and to hold leaders accountable by allowing citizens to access public records. This week, in a victory for government transparency, a St. Louis City Circuit Judge ruled in favor of the Goldwater Institute’s clients and rejected a years-long effort by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to withhold public records from local journalists.

The case involves the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and reporter Jacob Barker—Goldwater’s clients—who for years have been seeking police records related to a 2020 death investigation involving a person who fell from the window of a downtown St. Louis apartment building. Police quickly classified the fall a suicide and concluded their investigation in just a few days. Barker asked the police department for copies of the incident reports and investigative reports, but the department would only provide a heavily redacted copy of the incident report.

Missouri’s Sunshine Law requires law enforcement agencies to maintain “incident reports” that document certain details about the immediate facts and circumstances surrounding the initial report of an incident—and it specifies that these reports are always open to the public. The law also states that any record prepared by law enforcement personnel (other than an incident report) that inquires into a crime, suspected crime, or a reported incident must be open to the public once the relevant investigation becomes inactive. This level of transparency enables citizens to evaluate for themselves the information the police have gathered and to draw their own conclusions about whether cases are being handled appropriately.

The Goldwater Institute sued because the department refused to give Barker copies of the narratives in which the responding officers described their observations and logged statements made by potential witnesses. The government’s lawyers claimed that although the police officer narratives were attached to an “incident report”—which is always an open record—the department did not need to produce them because they were not part of the incident report.  At the same time, they argued that the department did not have to produce the officer narratives because, being attached to an incident report, they were not separate investigative records that became open when the investigation ended.

This week’s decision correctly held that Missouri law enforcement agencies do not get to have it both ways.  An officer narrative describing a response to a reported incident must be open to the public either because it is part of an incident report or because it is an investigative record.  The state’s transparency statute does not let the government justify withholding public records by arguing “heads, I win; tails, you lose.”

You can read today’s decision here.

Dave Roland is the Director of Allied Litigation at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.