Officer says adherence to law improving

Web posted December 13, 1999

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By Cassandra Lindsay
The Albany Herald

Athens-Clarke County police Officer Wesley Horney has been working for the department for two years. Before that, he was a practicing attorney in Atlanta. In an interview, Officer Horney said compliance with open records laws and the state of public access in law enforcement is improving:

Q: If you could change anything about the open records act, what would it be?

A: I think I would commission a study to look at what are the best ways to protect the victims and witnesses and the information that can be provided on them dealing with certain sorts of crimes. I think that perhaps they may be left unprotected in many cases.

Q: Do you agree that compliance rates will go up as more law enforcement agencies become familiar with the new laws?

A: I do. ... I see things as improving. I know the way we have things, it works really well and there's no reason it can't in other places.

Q: Has the new law been a burden?

A: No. I think it runs better now than it has in the past. I have a lot of functions, and this just takes up a small amount of the time. I just think that we have it well-organized, and it's just not a problem for us.

Our chief is in favor of open government. There's not this, ``These are our records and you can't have them,'' mentality.

Q: How often would you estimate people come in who aren't media-related or lawyers and ask for an incident report?

A: We get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of requests every month. And a great many of them are people wanting things on themselves or their property. But we also have people who will just call me and say, `I live on this street and I'm curious about what the crime is like.' So a lot of times I'll refer them to an officer who handles that, and he'll talk to them. If they want specific information, they'll request incident reports.

Q: Is there a difference between what reporters are able to get and what the general public gets?

A: Not really -- it's kind of a procedural thing. In other words, the public can have anything they want. The only difference is, like accident reports, the media can get the whole stack of them. If we had a citizen say, `I want to see the entire day's incident reports,' we would allow them to. But what we would do is supervise them if we didn't know them ... to make sure when we gave the stack to the next person that it was the complete stack. But other than the accident reports, I can't think of anything we do special for the media. We try to treat everyone the same.