SPRING 2006 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

Metro jailers cooperate to tell more, but not Gwinnett; 
it cites possible security breaches in ‘trade secrets’

By Tom Bennett

Lilburn, Ga., March 3, 2006 – The two greatest civil-rights movies are about Southern sheriffs and their secrecy. "To Kill a Mockingbird" ends with the sheriff covering up a murder. "Sounder" revolves around a child’s wanderings to find the prison work camp to which his father has been assigned, because the sheriff won’t divulge this basic fact: Where is the jail?

Georgia’s law-enforcement juggernaut saw computers and freedom of information coming, and moved in 1972 to get Gov. Jimmy Carter’s signature on a "Catch-22" exemption. This shattered hopes for regular disclosure of aggregated police information to citizens and the media. It is the statute right out of Orwell saying that records open at the local level turn into state secrets once they arrive at the Georgia Crime Information Center in Decatur.

Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, of which GCIC is a part, decided to do something about it. In 2002, he worked with Hollie Manheimer, executive director of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, to post GCIC’s in-state felony data on the web site you are reading. It is an important first step, and yet a host of other state crime records still are shielded by the Carter law.

It is one thing to talk about moving a database around in cyberspace and another to actually get it done. The person who has the keyboard know-how to achieve this synergy of sorts between GFAF and GBI is 39-year-old David A. Milliron. He is a big man, 6-feet-5 and 350 pounds, who has cut quite a swath through Georgia freedom of information since moving here from Washington’s Gannett News Service in 1998. He is director of computer-assisted reporting and analysis for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

‘GEORGIA LAW WAS A LITTLE MURKY’

Was conveying the in-state felonies to a non-profit organization, and thereby widening access to them, his greatest Georgia FOI accomplishment so far?

"Yes, it was," Milliron said. "GBI recognized that Georgia law was a little murky in the sense that, how can it be that one individual record at a time is a public record, but not the whole database? The fact that we were able to do get that without a lawsuit or change in legislation was a great feat. But we couldn’t have done so without the cooperation of the GBI."

Milliron has a professional manner at all times, and he is courteous to a fault. Even the most obdurate Georgia public official who took the time to find out much about him might have to concede he is a committed person.

"My hobbies?" Milliron asked, repeating my question. "I take old computers and rebuild them and donate them to schools, churches and the less fortunate. I also travel a lot, and enjoy restoring and renovating old houses.’

And for the past five years, Milliron has served as the youth advisor at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Decatur. During that time, he has taken the high school youth to three mission trips into the heart of Mexico. There the youths minister in remote villages and run Vacation Bible School services for the children. They have also participating in building churches and missionary dorms that will open this summer.

Virginia Baptists helped convince James Madison to sponsor a Bill of Rights, launching U.S. freedom of information. After awhile in journalism, you learn that much of the FOI work is being done by people of faith who have transferred their religious zeal to public life. Milliron, a former Florida police reporter, is in the tenth month of what he says is the greatest mission of his work in Georgia. It is to convince the 21 sheriffs in the greater metro Atlanta area to abide by the law and hand over electronic copies of their jail arrest booking databases.

"(Deputy Managing Editor) Shawn McIntosh asked me, ‘Why are you hitting all twenty-one at the same time?’" Milliron recalled. "The answer is simple. If four agencies use the same software to house their data, but one or two of the agencies don’t know how to respond to an electronic records request, then you can use the cooperating agencies and overall experience to educate one another."

"Why am I amassing these? Because Georgia law says that at the state level misdemeanors are not public record, and any arrest that didn’t result in a conviction is not public record. So when you run a public criminal history check on a person, all you’re getting is those in-state felony arrests where the GBI has a conviction status on file. So I estimate there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of records that are not in the state’s database or otherwise available to the general public."

POLICE TRANSPARENCY'S STARTING POINT

Jail-log access transcends the civil, press and speech rights; it is a fundamental element of human rights. One of the surprises coming out of the public record audits in the late 1990s was that long before any sunshine-law titles with any teeth began to appear in state codes, there was disclosure of jail logs. If someone doesn’t come home, the family has a right to know if he or she is in the jail.

The logs have moved out of big, black binders with handwriting. In a more sophisticated era, police stations have to computerize to be in the FBI’s NIBRS system and thereby get a chance at accreditation and federal funds. Officers who have computer training are being promoted to commander. There are visionary state law enforcement leaders such as the GBI’s Keenan who are working to overcome old statutes that block access. In this climate, a fair amount of progress toward openness is being made.

The AJC’s Milliron began in May 2005 to write what are among Georgia’s least welcome letters – his open-records requests – asking metro Atlanta sheriff’s and the Atlanta Police Department for a duplicate copy of their coveted jail arrest booking databases. A breakthrough occurred last year when ComnetiX of Oakville, Ontario, acquired Paragon Total Solutions of Carrollton, Georgia. At the time nearly 60 sheriff’s departments in Georgia used Paragon’s software to manage jail bookings. These included five of Milliron’s current targets, namely the county jails of Bartow, Carroll, Newton, Pickens and Walton.

"ComnetiX came out strong and told the newspaper that it was the company’s responsibility to make sure each of its clients could respond to requests for computerized records," Milliron said. "ComnetiX created a module that it makes available for free to any of its Georgia clients that allows them to be responsive to electronic public records requests. Before getting the module, none of the sheriff’s departments I contacted had the wherewithal to respond."

Milliron said he has had "wonderful experiences" with a number of agencies, namely the Barrow, Cobb, Hall and Rockdale sheriff’s departments. Fulton County "took a couple of tries but they finally got it right," he said. The Atlanta Police Department permitted him to sit down at a computer in its offices and show them how to duplicate the data. Forsyth and Paulding counties had "very archaic systems in place," but worked with him to grant access.

BREAKTHROUGH IN WINDER, GA.

It is Barrow County that is going to hold a prominent place in the history of this aspect of open government when it is written someday. Several metro Atlanta sheriff’s agencies used the same software vendor as Barrow County. That vendor, according to Milliron, saw the newspaper’s requests for public information as an opportunity to make money and even tried to bill the newspaper $900 for what it said took six hours to duplicate a portion of Henry County’s jail database.

"Barrow County wasn’t going to pay the vendor hundreds of dollars to do what the software should have been able to do in the first place," said Milliron, "which is to permit the sheriff’s office to respond to public requests for electronic jail records."

Barrow County invited Milliron in to do its extract for them, which he said took less than an hour to extract its jail log from a Microsoft Access database. The Atlanta Police Department offered Milliron the same deal. He extracted its data in less than an hour from a Microsoft SQL Server database.

"The whole ordeal left such a bad taste in Barrow’s mouth that it dumped the vendor for ComnetiX," Milliron said. "Barrow quickly introduced me to its new vendor -- ComnetiX – but went the extra mile to tell its salesperson that its software had to be able to respond to such future requests or ‘no deal.’ The rest is history."

Since 1998, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker has made the Open Government Mediation Program a principal feature of his office. The sunshine law used to be violated with impunity and nothing happened. Now citizens send hundreds of requests for help to the state’s Law Department. Stefan Ritter is the deputy attorney general working against the tide of paper to respond. Somewhere in his bulging brown accordion folders are the AJC’s requests for help in getting cooperation from seven holdouts in the jail database project. They are Clayton, Coweta, DeKalb, Fayette, Gwinnett, Henry and Spalding counties.

GWINNETT COUNTY FEARS THE WORST

The problem for Milliron is that the Gwinnett information is not comprehensive enough for newsgathering practices. He sent his Open Records Act request to Sheriff Butch Conway in May 2005. Six months passed and then he received a three-page letter from the Gwinnett County Department of Law, on behalf of Sheriff Conway. This letter is an effort to put the whole project in jail. It is a shot across the bow of the ship of greater police transparency in Georgia.

She attached a 24-page affidavit from the county’s computer software provider, Syscon Justice Systems Ltd. of British Columbia. "Trade secrets" are the lexicon for many a sunshine-law exemption around the nation and Syscon asserts this for the records that Milliron and the paper want.

In appealing to Georgia sheriffs, Milliron cites O.C.G.A. 50-18-70(a), which makes subject to state access laws any public records that are stored on a government agency’s computer system. However, Gwinnett’s Melinda K. Wells turns a few pages in Title 50 to find O.C.G.A. 50-18-72(f)(2). It says the Open Records Act doesn’t apply to any computer program or software used or maintained in the course of a public office or agency. (That’s a statute violated every time a home sale is published, and one potentially doomed by H.B. 833 now in the General Assembly. This would shift the public notices of 1,000-plus local governments onto a state computer program.)

Melinda K. Wells’ greatest fear is that hackers could get into Gwinnett’s Offender Management System. The inmates’ release dates could change. Courts could be in disarray.

"Hackers could enter the system and alter release dates and other vital offender information," Wells wrote. "Efficiency would be impaired by the need constantly to cross-check dates and information to paper sources, which would likely result in missed court dates and unauthorized release of detainees."

Milliron responded: "Gwinnett’s perceived inability to properly safeguard government records is no excuse for violating lawful access to public records. If Gwinnett County is that concerned about its security, it should consider out-sourcing all of its computer services to a company that can guarantee its security."

He has had "wonderful experiences" with some metro Atlanta sheriff’s agencies, but cannot say as much for the seven holdouts, including Gwinnett.

Tom Bennett is a volunteer for GFAF and a retired news employee of the Journal-Constitution.