WORCESTER – The City of Worcester once again faces a lawsuit over refusal to provide police-related public records to a news organization.
The Boston Globe announced in an article on Thursday, May 22, that it filed lawsuits against police departments in Worcester, Boston, Springfield, New Bedford, and the Massachusetts State Police. The lawsuits accuse all five departments of refusing to provide documents related to their confidential informant networks, which the Globe alleges violates the Massachusetts Public Records Law.
The Globe says it “requested basic, anonymized information about confidential informants from each of Massachusetts’ 400-plus law enforcement agencies,” of which “about a quarter of them did not reply at all.”
The article said that its investigations revealed that “at least 815 people are registered as confidential informants and working in some capacity for police departments across Massachusetts,” with departments paying those informants over $300,000. It also says the real numbers are, “without question far higher.”
“The public has the right to know how often its police departments build cases upon unidentified informants, what the practices are for using and protecting these informants, and ensuring this shadowy system is serving justice,” the Globe’s editor, Nancy Barnes, said in a released statement.
The City of Worcester does not comment on pending litigation.
Previous Lawsuits Against Worcester for Police Records
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette sued the City of Worcester in May 2000, after the city claimed the entire content of an internal investigation file was exempt from public disclosure under the exemption for personnel files or information.
A Massachusetts Superior Court judge’s decision in May 2003 required the city release the entire file, unredacted. The city appealed, and an appeals court panel of judges largely upheld the superior court ruling. The appeals court found one document, “a memorandum from the city’s chief of police to thepolice officer against whom allegations of police misconduct had been made,” exempt from disclosure. The court ordered all other documents released.
In 2018, the Telegram & Gazette again sued after the city again refused to release files related to internal investigations of misconduct. It also refused to release the history of internal affairs investigations of 17 officers.
The city maintains what it calls an “officer information card” for each police officer it employs. This document shows the history of each internal investigation into that officer, along with the individual misconduct allegations, and the category of the conclusion for each.
This time, the city argued that disclosing the internal investigation documents would compromise its ability to defend police officers against lawsuits alleging misconduct.
The current Massachusetts Public Records Law, enacted in 2016, does not provide for an exemption because of litigation.
The case went to trial in December 2020.
In June 2021, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker issued a ruling finding the City of Worcester unlawfully withheld thousands of pages of police investigations and disciplinary records. Kenton-Walker also wrote in her decision that the city acted in bad faith by withholding the documents illegally and justified its withholding of the documents by citing “cherry-picked” language from past litigation and “taking it out of context.”
The judge ordered the city to pay over $100,000 in fees for the attorneys representing the Telegram, and an additional $5,000 in the first punitive damages awarded in a public records case since the law went into effect in 2016.
The Telegram asked for more than double what Kenton-Walker awarded for attorneys’ fees and appealed that part of the ruling. The city eventually settled that part of the case and paid $180,000 for the litigation costs of the Telegram.
The city did not appeal the decision which ordered the documents released.
The City of Worcester hired the law firm Hassett Donnely to represent it in the most recent case brought by the Telegram. It says it cannot provide its cost of litigation for the records case as it hired the firm for multiple cases for a single fee.
In the end, the city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds to delay disclosure of public records to the public for around four years.
