Mass State Police Named Most Secretive Government Agency in America

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Patrick Sargent, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Image Credit: PolicyMic

Massachusetts State Police has been awarded the Golden Padlock award for being the most secretive government agency in the United States.

The award, which is given by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) is a tongue-in-cheek honor aimed at the MSP’s lack of transparency.

“True commitment, no matter how offensive to the public interest, must be begrudgingly recognized," said Robert Cribb, chair of IRE’s Golden Padlock committee. "The Massachusetts State Police has distinguished itself as a agency unwavering in its willingness to ensure citizens are protected from the truth."

The award was announced on June 6 at the IRE’s annual conference in Philadelphia. A representative from the MSP was invited to attend the conference, but the invitation went ignored.

According to IRE, MSP goes to “extraordinary lengths” to avoid fulfilling public records request, and goes to similar lengths to protect its officers and public officials from scrutiny of performance.

IRE notes that requests to the State Police for basic documents typically get refused or are subject to enormous fees in order to be processed. For example, “a $42,750 fee for the log of its public records requests and a $62,220 fee for records of crashes involving police cruisers sought by the Boston Globe.”

This is the third straight year IRE has handed out a Golden Padlock award. Other finalists this year included the U.S. Department of Defense, Colorado Judicial Branch and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

In 2013, the U.S. Border Patrol took the award. In 2014, co-winners of the Golden Padlock were the U.S. Navy FOIA Office and Governors Mary Fallin of Oklahoma and Jay Nixon of Missouri.

Former MSP Superintendent Responds

"You can’t react or respond to everybody’s opinion on how things have to be done. You have to follow the laws and the statutes and make sure things are done in a professional manner, but on the other hand, it costs tax payers thousands and thousands of dollars to respond to every trivial media request that comes in on a daily basis. This whole process was put in place because of that. They can’t be putting all sorts of manpower on searching records because somebody has a whim," said former Mass State Police Superintendent Thomas Foley.

“Every state has a different situation as far as how many requests organizations are dealing with. You’re dealing with every city and town newspaper that’s within Massachusetts and even papers outside the state nationally. When media requests start coming in for information, whether they’re founded or not, it’s overwhelming," said Foley. "There’s a process put in place and it’s not an unreasonable one. It’s not that they are denying anyone information. It’s that it can get pretty frivolous at times. A lot of the media don’t want to hear that, they want free access, but someone has to be there to say ‘Okay, what’s relevant and what isn’t?’ What’s a legitimate request and what’s a frivolous request?’”

According to Foley, it's not a case of denying access of information to the public, but it's a matter of protect the public's funding. “You don’t have the resources to fulfill every request that comes in. Agencies out there don’t even have the resources to have enough police officers out there. You can’t tie up the agency with all these expenditures and with the cost of putting all of these people on all these searches for information for a media request," said Foley. "Most agencies will put a price on it and sit back and say ‘Okay, is this information that important?'"

MSP Wants to Communicate with General Public

As GoLocalWorcester reported last week, MSP is surveying Massachusetts residents to get a better understanding of the department’s effectiveness in public communication.

Through a statewide citizen survey and social media the State Police are hoping to be more open and accessible to the citizens they serve. The survey is being conducted by an independent agency and is completely anonymous. People who take the survey will not be asked for any personal identifiable information and results of the survey will be reported to the State Police in aggregate only.