We have to give this week’s award to the most uncooperative government to the city of Graham. And with special brickbats to the Graham Police Department and its ostensible public information officer (PIO), Captain Daniel Sisk.
In reality, Captain Sisk’s assignment, while listed as an information officer, actually appears to be to provide as little public information as possible – at least that is certainly the practical impact of his actions over the past week.
Now, we understand that there are some inherent conflicts between the interests of law enforcement and the news media.
Law enforcement folks are, inevitably, going to be pretty tight-lipped, particularly in the middle of an investigation.
But when the investigation is over, when a person is charged with a crime, then the “incident report” is supposed to be open to public review.
But not according to the Graham Police Department.
Reprinted nearby are copies of four almost entirely blacked-out portions of a four-page “report” from Graham’s Police Department.
The report deals with the charges against “Chuck” Talley, the husband of Graham mayor Jennifer Talley.
Elsewhere in this edition, Chuck Talley gives a pretty exhaustive explanation of his side of the story regarding the charges filed against him, based on the complaints from Jason Cox and his father, Homer Cox.
Chuck Talley repeatedly emphasized to The Alamance News that neither he nor the mayor had anything to do with the subsequently-redacted incident report.
Both Coxes complained that Chuck Talley unbolted a bollard that they had installed in an alleyway in downtown Graham.
Now, other officials in the city of Graham are also complicit in concealing of public information.
The Alamance News has been trying since earlier this week to get some interpretation from the city’s attorneys, Bob Ward and Bryan Coleman, on the status of the unnamed alley where the Coxes put up the bollard to prevent traffic from proceeding.
Neither could find the time to respond, neither by email nor phone, to our inquiry about the city’s official conclusions on whether the alley is public or privately-owned – and if the latter, whether the Coxes are the owners who can control access through it, as they apparently claim.
We say “apparently,” since Jason Cox didn’t return two phone calls – one last week, one this week – left by this newspaper’s reporter for him.
It is also only “apparently,” since the police department’s incident report about their complaint has a narrative about the incident – all of which has been blacked out, redacted, by the police department.
That’s contrary to the Public Records Law, which says, in plain English, that among the public information that is to remain available is “the time, date, location, and nature of a violation or apparent violation of the law reported to a public law enforcement agency. [emphasis added]
Yet absolutely nothing about the “nature of a violation” is available in the city of Graham’s police report, as provided to this newspaper.
The heavily redacted Graham Police Department report:
To view the “full report” (as redacted and provided to the newspaper), click HERE.
The Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides guidance to local governments on many areas of public law, including the Public Records Law. In one such summary, one of the Institute’s specialists described that the information to be provided involves “details of criminal incidents.”
Frankly, our protests of the initial situation apparently only made the city’s intransigence worse.
We first attempted to access the report last Wednesday (July 17), when a reporter went to the police department to review the report of the incident.
When the reporter returned with a two-page report, the second page of which was entirely blacked out, the publisher personally went back to the police department to demand more public information.
Nope, said Sisk, if you want anything more, you’ll have to go to court.
We asked Sisk to have the police chief, Kristy Cole Baker, give us a call, so we could discuss the heavily-censored report that had been provided last week. No call was received on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.
Finally, when the publisher ran into the police chief during a social engagement Monday afternoon, for the retirement of Mebane’s city manager Chris Rollins, he reiterated the earlier request for a phone call and asked her (this time, directly) to call him.
More than 36 hours later, when she had not, the publisher filed a formal letter highlighting the requirements of the law and asking for access to an “an unredacted, or at least substantially less redacted” copy of the report on Cox vs. Talley.
Instead, on Wednesday afternoon, we were provided with a four-page copy of the report.
Rather than simply a second page being entirely redacted, pages two, three, and four were entirely redacted.
That’s not complying with state law. (The department only unredacted the addresses of Talley and both Coxes, which we had pointed out are explicitly required by the statute.)
The city’s police department inevitably puts out news releases all the time with far more information about arrests and serious crimes than was available in the report about this dust-up between the downtown business owners.
In our view, the need for transparency was all the more urgent inasmuch as the report involved the husband of Graham mayor Jennifer Talley. The appearance that the department was deliberately concealing information on his involvement in this incident makes this an all the more appalling violation of the Public Records Law.
To his credit, Chuck Talley, was willing to be interviewed extensively and gave many details about the incident, provided a picture of the bollard before he removed it, and showed the types of bolts he had cut off. Again, he emphasized that he had nothing to do with the police department’s self-appointed censorship of public information about his case.
We’ll leave to a district court judge whether this case really rises to a criminal offense.
Meanwhile, we’re left with the very disconcerting impression that the Graham Police Department is not functioning on a very professional – and certainly not an open and transparent – level.
Barney Fife’s bumbling actions on the old black and white era Andy Griffith Show was a funny law enforcement officer 50 years ago. But that was a television comedy show.
There’s nothing humorous about Graham Police Department’s ham-handed handling of a spat over a bollard and its refusal to provide basic information about it.
It is frankly a disgrace, and only provides further ammunition to those who have had concerns about the department’s professional standards – or the lack thereof.
