A Georgia Court of Appeals panel on March 13 struck down a trial court’s summary judgment against Appen Media in its Open Records Act lawsuit with the City of Sandy Springs regarding police incident reports.
“The procedural determination by the court does not affect the substantive part of the Trial court decision,” Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul said in an interview with Rough Draft after the ruling was released.
Paul said the city council will discuss the ruling and proceed in a way to ensure public access to vital information while protecting the integrity of the investigative process.
Rough Draft Atlanta reached out to Appen Media representatives for comment, but has not received a statement yet.
The Sandy Springs Police Department shared one-sentence incident reports with the newspaper group. The city acknowledged officers responding to an incident sometimes wrote more detailed narratives in a separate document titled, “Investigating Officer Narrative.”
The city took the position that the narratives were supplemental reports exempt from disclosure, the the court’s opinion said.
Judge Brian Rickman said in his March 13 opinion that the city did not meet its burden to show why the requested records should not be disclosed as a matter of law. Judge Amanda H. Mercier concurred with his opinion.
Judge Christopher J. McFadden concurred with overturning the trial court’s summary judgment ruling against Appen Media. But in his special concurrence, he said Rickman’s opinion ignores the declaration in the Open Records Act that public records should be made available for public inspection without delay and that exceptions should be interpreted narrowly.
“Today’s opinion ignores those findings and declarations and violates those directions. Today’s opinion construes the provision before us to render its disclosure requirement substantively meaningless,” McFadden said.
McFadden said putting a full narrative in a separate report went against the intent of the Open Records Act.
“I would hold that this practice is an improper circumvention of the Act and that the responding officer’s full narrative about his or her initial response to the incident also constitutes an ‘initial incident report’ subject to disclosure under the Act,” McFadden said.
The trial court said in its ruling that Appen Media may be correct that the separate narratives violate the spirit of the Open Records Act. However, the trial court said the narratives were not part of an initial incident report and did not have to be disclosed. The trial court granted summary judgment to the city, which the Court of Appeals overturned in the March ruling.
Appen Media appealed the trial court’s ruling.
The Open Records Act does not define “initial incident reports,” so the Rickman’s opinion said the court must define the term. It defined it as the first incident report completed by a law enforcement officer on a standard incident report form when beginning a criminal investigation.
“This is an issue of great significance for Georgia citizens and Georgia law enforcement agencies. In the absence of a statutory definition, we have provided one. The General Assembly, however, has the option of providing a more detailed definition after public discourse and debate,” Rickman wrote.
The Court of Appeals panel said whether a narrative report prepared at the same time as an incident report is part of that initial incident report is a fact of specific inquiry. They could not say, as a matter of law, that a narrative report is not part of the initial incident report subject to disclosure under the Open Records Act.
“Thus, the trial court’s grant of summary judgment was premature. Genuine issues of material fact remain based on this record and thus the trial court erred by granting summary judgment to the City,” Rickman’s opinion said.
Appen Media’s request for a summary judgment against Sandy Springs was denied in the March ruling. The ruling said genuine issues of material fact exist on whether the city violated the Open Records Act.
