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If a citizen walks into the lobby of the police station or courthouse where you work and requests a copy of a police report or court case file, do you give it to them? Can you give it to them? Do you have to remove parts of it, and if so, which parts? The truth is that many police officers and court clerks are unsure about what they can and can’t give out.
Every state in the U.S. has its own version of a public records act, so make sure you know the specific law in your area. Most acts, however, require that non-confidential records maintained by state, county and city governments be made available to the public. This excludes information related to an ongoing investigation or protected confidential work product. Often, it’s still a balancing act between the public’s right to know versus victim and witness privacy issues.
Protecting Victims & Witnesses
In an effort to protect victim rights and reduce threats against witnesses, agencies around the country often take great pains to strip or “redact” information from police reports that may compromise their safety. Redaction, removing information from documents, is necessary when confidential or sensitive information must be obscured or omitted from a public file before final release.
For example: Courts across the nation have acknowledged that disseminating identifying information that causes the victims of crime unnecessary emotional pain or violates victims’ desire to maintain their privacy is a violation of the law. In most situations, victim names and other sensitive identifying information serve no useful public or investigative purpose that would outweigh the victim’s right to privacy. Redaction is a simple way to protect victims and still afford necessary information to the defense in criminal cases. Protecting victim privacy is critical and we need to be vigilant in this day and age of easy dissemination of information. In California, penal code section 964 requires the district attorney and the courts in each county to establish a procedure to protect confidential information regarding any witness or victims contained in a police report, arrest report or investigative report submitted to a court by a prosecutor in support of a criminal complaint, indictment or information, or by a prosecutor or LEO in support of a search warrant or an arrest warrant.
When responding to legal requests for reports, police agencies must first review and redact them as required by law before releasing them to the public. Personal information such as social security numbers, birth dates, phone numbers or credit card numbers are typically protected, as is medical information and any specific descriptions of bodily injury in accordance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). To make this very serious and often daunting task possible, police agencies are turning to software like Redact-It to help improve the efficiency of this process.
Redact-It Software
Redact-It combines powerful search technology with redaction tools to help remove the right data quickly and efficiently. One of the strengths of this software is that it doesn’t just “cover up” sensitive information; it completely removes it from the document along with any metadata and hidden content. This means that only visible content is transferred to the new, redacted file and the original document remains safe and intact.
Operation is relatively straightforward. You can purchase the software online ($195) and download it onto your computer. Then open the program, browse and open a document you want to redact and start reading. As you come to a name or piece of information you want to redact, just double click the word and it will now be covered with a black text box. The nice feature is that the black text box occurs every time the term or name is mentioned in the entire police report.
In my sample test, I looked at a typical nine-page police report, which consisted of several fill-in-the-blank crime reports or face sheets, as well as a witness list and multiple pages of narrative describing the investigation. Each time I encountered a name of a victim or witness, I simply double clicked on the word and it was automatically covered by a clean black box. I repeated this for phone numbers, social security numbers and addresses, and the entire report was redacted in about five minutes. The report looked cleaner and more professional than using a black marker and then running the report through a copy machine. This software works great with Word and pdf files, although you may need to keep a marker handy for hand-written documents—those might not be easily searchable by this software.
Redact-It offers the ability to search for words or phrases and automatically redact all instances of that text throughout the document. Redact-It also comes with pattern-matching capabilities that search for standard patterns like phone numbers, social security numbers and credit card numbers to help ensure they’re not overlooked. Some homicide cases, for example, could be hundreds—maybe even thousands—of pages, so software that can recognize patterns can be a tremendous benefit.
The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) option renders pdf documents as text-searchable—meaning you can scan a report and start searching it. When you’re done redacting and have your finished product, Redact-It creates a new redacted version of the document as a pdf or tiff file that you can release to the public, while also keeping the original report in your file.
In Sum
Law enforcement officers and prosecutors are dedicated to protecting lives and property. When it comes to releasing public records, they’re also called upon to protect privacy and confidential information, and Redact-It can be helpful in accomplishing this goal. The benefits of this software are obvious. The ability to review and redact reports more quickly and accurately saves time and money.
Redact-It Software
Pros
• Fast, simple & automated redaction process
• No revealing metadata
• Optical character recognition feature
Cons
• May not easily work with hand-written documents
Approximate street price: $195
CONTACT
Informative Graphics Corp.
800/398-7005
