Request By:
Mr. Richard Trimble
Editor
Barbourville Mountain Advocate
P.O. Box 198
Barbourville, Kentucky 40906
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an opinion of the Attorney General on two questions on the Kentucky Open Records Law. KRS 61.870-61.884, as it applies to police records.
Your first question is whether there is a Kentucky law requiring police departments to maintain daily logs of arrests made by policemen. There is such a law.
KRS 17.150 provides as follows:
"(1) Every sheriff, chief of police, coroner, jailer, judge, prosecuting attorney, court clerk, probation officer, parole officer; warden or superintendent of a prison, reformatory, correctional school, mental hospital or institution for the retarded; State Police, State Fire Marshal, Board of Alcoholic Beverage Control; Department for Human Resources; Department of Transportation; Bureau of Corrections; and every other person or criminal justice agency, public or private, dealing with crimes or criminals or with delinquency or delinquents, when requested by the department, shall:
(a) install and maintain records needed for reporting data required by the department. . ."
Subsection (4) of KRS 17.150 provides that the centralized criminal history records kept by the State Police at the headquarters in Frankfort are not subject to public inspection but further provides as follows:
"Nothing in this subsection shall apply to documents maintained by criminal justice agencies which are the source of information collected by the Department of Justice. Criminal justice agencies shall retain such documents and no official thereof shall willfully conceal or destroy any record with intent to violate the provisions of this section."
Police departments are, therefore, required to keep records and make their records available for public inspection except intelligence and investigative reports until prosecution is completed or a determination not to prosecute has been made. KRS 17.150(2). A police department works for the public, is accountable to the public, and its records are subject to public inspection. It cannot avoid its accountability by failing to keep records.
Your second question is, "Can the Mayor bar reporters from access to these logs of arrest and/or publishing the information on the basis that as a matter of policy we don't operate in similar fashion with the county and state police? "
In OAG 79-387 (copy attached) we discussed the right of newspaper reporters and other persons to inspect police records and the constitutional right under the First Amendment for the press to publish news it acquires from any source. Obviously a police chief, a mayor or any other official, national, state or local, does not have the power to order a newspaper to refrain from publishing news. In a special case, on a one-time basis, a court might order the news media to refrain from publishing news about a particular case, but a court could not order the suppression of news on a particular subject such as arrest.
Since police arrest records are not exempted by the Open Records Law, KRS 61.878, no official has the authority to withhold the records from public inspection. Since the Mayor is not the custodian of the police records he has no jurisdiction over such records in any event.
The fact that your newspaper does not publish similar records from the sheriff's office or the regional office of the State Police has no bearing on your right of access to the police records of the City of Barbourville. What a newspaper or other news medium publishes or does not publish is a matter entirely within its discretion.