Officials say secrecy sometimes needed in government affairs

GREENWOOD -- A man calls the police after he thinks he hears a woman screaming next door. He tells the dispatcher he thinks his neighbor's wife is being beaten.

Police show up to find children simply roughhousing and screaming in the backyard, but by law they file an incident report. The local newspaper obtains the report, runs a story about the incident and the man at the house gets falsely accused of being a wife-beater by his community.

A major manufacturer is planning to build a new facility in an economically depressed region. The region's newspaper reports the possibility, and soon local politicians are bombarding the company with promises and requests. The manufacturer - which could have brought 400 jobs to the area - decides to move to another state where it is better able to control the flow of information.

These are just two scenarios that defenders of exemptions in Mississippi's sunshine laws cite as reasons to limit public access to some information.

Although the state's Open Meetings Law and Public Records Act both say transparency should be the guiding principle in government, each statute contains a few exemptions. Police incident reports, for instance, are not public records, and public bodies such as a city council or a board of supervisors can go behind closed doors to discuss a potential new industry.

"Law enforcement has a job to do - just like prosecutors do - and they are both very reluctant to release information that could impede an ongoing investigation," said Trey Bobinger, a Jackson-based attorney who is a lobbyist for the Mississippi Sheriffs Association.

"These incident reports are delicate territory," Bobinger said. "And while the media absolutely has a responsibility to the public to let them know what's going on, I don't think anyone in the public is saying, 'I want to know what's going on even if it prohibits law enforcement from catching criminals.' "

Bobinger, who has worked with the sheriffs association for seven years and previously served as a spokesman for the state attorney general, said calls to make incident reports public are overblown.

"From what I have seen, the release of information to the media by sheriffs and other law enforcement agencies has not been a problem across the state," Bobinger said. "Most sheriffs have a very good relationship with their local newspapers and other media outlets. I'm not saying there hasn't been problems in the past, but when they do pop up, they're isolated."

For the past several years, the Mississippi Press Association and other open-government advocates have lobbied the Legislature without success to remove the exemption for incident reports maintained by law enforcement agencies.