SEATTLE — The Seattle Times is suing the Seattle Police Department, alleging it has failed to live up to a 2023 agreement to improve how and when it releases public records.
By neglecting its obligations, negotiated over months, the public is being denied access to information on important department matters, notably the behavior of the recently fired police chief, Adrian Diaz, said Michele Matassa Flores, the executive editor of The Seattle Times.
“We are acting as a proxy for the public, and the public has a right to know how important government agencies are handling government business,” said Matassa Flores. “And in this case, the Police Department has such magnified importance because of the sensitive nature of the work they do and their daily contact with the public.”
At issue is how the department receives and processes requests for records — a right guaranteed by state law for more than 50 years to promote transparency in government.
Under a policy set by former Mayor Ed Murray in 2017, the department was allowed to “group” requests made by a single person — even those made months apart — into one.
While intended to make the records process more efficient, in practice the policy allowed SPD to continually delay the release of records as each new request came through, the lawsuit says. In some egregious cases, records could take years to be released, often long past when the information they contain is relevant.
The slow process became particularly salient in summer 2020 and the months that followed, as intense scrutiny landed on the department and its handling of citywide protests and the abandonment of its East Precinct.
People made thousands of requests, often receiving estimates of more than a year.
As part of the agreement with The Times, the city of Seattle, on behalf of the department, agreed to reform its practice of grouping. Only requests filed within eight weeks of each other would be grouped. Any further apart, and they would be queued as individual requests.
Though SPD indeed modified its policies in 2023 — in addition to agreeing to hire four more public disclosure officers — the department stopped complying sometime around the end of last year, the complaint alleges.
“The Grouping Policy empowers the City staff to neglect new requests from those who have multiple older requests still pending,” Kathy George, lawyer for The Times, wrote in Wednesday’s complaint. “This punishes journalists and other requesters with a strong or recurring interest in City records.”
A spokesperson for the police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Times’ lawsuit was filed based on grouping allegations both from its own reporters and those who don’t work for the paper, including independent journalist Erica C. Barnett.
Times reporter Mike Carter filed multiple requests over several months related to rumors of an affair between Diaz and a subordinate, including for travel records and calendars.
In response, Carter was told by the department that his requests would be grouped together, a decision that would lead to more than a year of delay. Though his earliest request was in summer 2023, he was told he would have to wait until the end of 2024 to receive parts of his request.
In the interim, Diaz was first demoted from his position as chief and then fired in December — for matters all relevant to the records requested by Carter.
All of this was done despite SPD’s agreement to stop grouping requests.
“It’s a very clearly demonstrated case of public interest that was going on,” Matassa Flores said. “The fact that subsequently that chief was fired shows that this mattered a whole lot.”
The suit, filed in King County Superior Court, asks a judge to find the city of Seattle in violation of the public records act and to charge the city $100 for every day of delay for the unreleased record. It also asks the department to release all nonexempt records.
The Seattle Times has entered into three settlement agreements with the Seattle Police Department regarding public records. The first, in 2019, mandated refresher training for the mayor’s office. The second, in 2022, grew out of the case of former Mayor Jenny Durkan’s missing text messages, seen as relevant to understanding the chaos of 2020.
The third, related to grouping policies, was a “pre-litigation” agreement negotiated after representatives for The Times complained to the city’s top legal officials of delays in records being released.
“We’ve had three settlements with the Seattle Police Department already over public records cases, and they’ve demonstrated that those settlements are not worth a lot,” Matassa Flores said. “They don’t abide by them.”
The police department receives thousands of public records requests per year — well over 10,000 in 2023. That number shot up in the wake of widespread protests related to police accountability.
At the same time, staffing within the department has lagged.
Matassa Flores said that while she’s sympathetic to that burden, the Public Records Act nevertheless remains the law.
