If you get a public-records request, you can’t just pretend it never happened.
That means the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority could be paying thousands of dollars in fines and costs for ignoring a pair of requests from Ideastream.
After CMHA officer James Griffiths shot and killed a black teenager near the King–Kennedy High Rise, reporter Matthew Richmond began asking questions about whether the shooting was captured on a security camera nearby. But CMHA refused to answer his questions and said it turned over its videos to the Cleveland Division of Police, so Richmond just requested the video itself — along with a copy of Officer Griffiths’ personnel file.
Because government security camera footage is normally a public record in Ohio, CMHA was required to produce it. But Cleveland refused to turn it over because it was part of an investigation (a violation of the Ohio Public Records Act), and CMHA just ignored Richmond (also a violation). Represented by the First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University, Ideastream sued CMHA and the City of Cleveland, which also refused to turn over the video.
The court referred the case to mediation, where CMHA and the City tried to escape liability by turning over the records before the court could enter an order compelling them to obey the law. Its arguments focused entirely on the videos it had not produced, ignoring its duty to explain its failure to produce the personnel files, and explicitly declining to present any argument why it shouldn’t be ordered to pay damages.
The strategy misjudged the court’s understanding of the case. The decision focused almost exclusively on CMHA’s refusal to produce the personnel files and the question of damages and costs, finding that Ideastream was entitled to both because CMHA “acted in bad faith” by sitting on the request for personnel files for more than three months. The court dodged any discussion of CMHA’s central argument—that the video is confidential investigatory record, even though it wasn’t created as part of any investigation—relying instead entirely on its refusal to turn over Officer Griffiths’s personnel file.
The court had another opportunity to confront that question in its separate decision resolving the case against the City of Cleveland, but it again refused to take it up. Instead, the court found that the case was moot because Ideastream had received the video, and it declined to award damages or court costs against Cleveland based on its finding that the city had not acted in bad faith, based on unspecified arguments the City had made at some point in the case.
Although the Ohio Supreme Court has already held that surveillance video is a public record, and that public records cannot become nonpublic just because they later become part of a law-enforcement investigation, the Eighth District’s decisions leave for another day the question of how those rules apply in cases when police seize surveillance footage from another public agency.
If you have problems accessing video records or any other public records, contact Speech Law LLC to learn how you can enforce your rights.