On Sept. 8, 2022 Baltimore Action Legal Team filed a complaint with the Baltimore City Office of the Inspector General. This filing comes after yet another glaring revelation of bad faith on the part of the Baltimore City Law Department.
In BALT’s recent case filing, 21 incidents of obstruction were recorded against the Law Department. This comes after BALT requested a year’s worth of internal investigations into police misconduct where the Law Department valued about 3000 responsive records at over $1.3 million.
Maryland law states that records that are of a public interest are to be granted a fee waiver. The Law Department waived an arbitrary $700k of costs to claim it had waived fees; they then violated the law by denying the waiver of the remaining $600k for reproduction of records benefiting public interest.
Per Law Department practice, BALT was forced to take BPD to court to obtain public disclosure. Just days before a court hearing, BPD responded that their initial response was an error and there were only about 1000 responsive records. This is nine months after an accurate and official accounting of records responsive to BALT’s request was due.
BALT responded that the initial fee waiver of over half the original costs should certainly cover what is now a third of the work, meaning the Law Department would have to turn over the records to the public at no cost. The Law Department quickly and without reason withdrew the $700k fee waiver, showing they never intended to grant a fee waiver, make the records available, or disclose any records to begin with.
As a result of a settlement agreement from a lawsuit earlier this year, BPD provided BALT data on costs and delay times for productions like the records BALT requested. The disclosure of body worn camera [BWC] footage made up more than 75% of the requests in the data provided and serves as one of a few means to monitor officers’ actions prior to Anton’s Law.
The data shows that of BWC records requests, attorneys averaged higher costs though they wait the same amount of time for records as other non government entities. Law enforcement requesting records do not have to pay and receive their records in about a third of the time. This was extracted from the only significant and usable data provided by BPD from the same three month period in 2018, 2019, and 2020.
“The amount of time it took for BWC requests to be fulfilled for Attorneys and Non-Government entities on average took about three times as long as BWC footage requested by Law Enforcement and State Agencies. This causes us to wonder why such a disparity in cost and time exists among different types of requesters in order to access the same information,” says BALT Data Analyst Vida Fye.
It is our belief in filing this complaint that Inspector General Isabel Cumming will see the facial abuse and disregard of the law by the Law Department and work with us toward accountability.