News that top officials at Louisville Metro Police Department had used the automatic message deleting app, Signal, to erase the electronic paper trail of their communications — and, consciously or unconsciously, to evade the open records law and public accountability — is yet another reminder that a public agency’s deeply rooted culture of secrecy and disfunction is nearly impossible to uproot.
It is especially disturbing viewed in the context of a law enforcement agency that has undergone rigorous scrutiny, both internal and external, that ultimately identified a lack of transparency and accountability as a primary source of disfunction.
Last year, Louisville Metro Council ordered a records management audit of Louisville Metro Police Department “on the heels of a lawsuit filed by a nonprofit police accountability group, The 490 Project, that accused the department of destroying complaints against officers in violation of the Kentucky Open Records Act.” Concluded in September, 2023, the audit failed to uncover LMPD’s use of Signal to automatically delete messages exchanged by command staff.
Like the prematurely destroyed complaints against officers that prompted The 490 Project’s lawsuit, which are required by state regulation to be retained for five years after an officer leaves the force, “routine” hard copy and electronic communications exchanged by command staff that are central to LMPD’s work and that deal with its general operations must be retained for two years according to legally binding records management laws. LMPD simply ignored these legal mandates, thereby thwarting public oversight.
As reporter Josh Wood notes in his recent article: “Top LMPD officers used app to automatically delete their texts, a potential crime”:
“Under Kentucky law, public agency officials who willfully conceal or destroy records to bypass the open records law are guilty of a Class A misdemeanor for each violation, which is punishable by up to 12 months imprisonment.
“A separate law makes tampering with public records, which occurs when a person knowingly destroys a public record or otherwise impairs its availability, a Class D felony punishable by between one and five years in prison.”
This illegal practice may have gone undetected were it not for Louisville Metro Government’s denial of the newspaper’s open records request for “all messages sent in an LMPD ‘command staff group chat’ mentioned in [the leaked recording of a May 22 command staff meeting] since May 17.”
“The messages,” Wood notes, “would have spanned a critical time for LMPD, as the department navigated its controversial, image-damaging arrest of the world’s No. 1 golfer, Scottie Scheffler, as well as a sexual misconduct scandal that ultimately unseated its chief.”
Louisville Metro responded that there were no responsive records. Officials later explained that Signal “was not structured to retain messages indefinitely” during the time period identified in the newspaper’s request.
To his credit, newly appointed Chief Paul Humphrey “recognized the need for change and directed the app’s use to be restructured” to ensure that the “Signal group chat used by LMPD command staff retains messages instead of deleting them.”
But LMPD’s cannot escape its past by continuing to react to embarrassing disclosures as they surface – especially those that expose it to legal liability. It bears the responsibility to thoroughly vet policies in advance of their implementation.
Given the likelihood that the use of message deleting apps is not limited to LMPD, all state and local government agencies would do well to examine existing and proposed practices involving the use of apps like Signal — and there are many — to ensure they strictly comply with state laws governing records retention and management.
It is no accident that Kentucky’s open records law recognizes an “essential relation[ship]” between laws governing records management and laws governing records access, and that it expressly declares that “to provide accountability of government activities, public agencies are required to manage and maintain their records according to the requirements of the law.” Failure to do so may have embarrassing — or much more serious — consequences.
--30--
Comments
