A Chesterfield judge sided with police in a legal fight over whether the names of the county’s police officers can be withheld from the public.
The Chesterfield County Police Department redacted the names of nearly every officer on its police force in response to a request for department payroll made by a police transparency advocate.
The department said that all 521 officers below the rank of lieutenant could go undercover at any point in his or her career, which is why the names should remain secret.
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Plaintiff Alice Minium said via lawyer Andrew Bodoh that most of the force isn’t undercover, and that the agency was merging the majority of public-facing officers with a much smaller unit that actually does undercover work, like controlled drug buys.
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The decision made by Chesterfield Circuit Court Judge Jayne A. Pemberton came in the wake of a bench trial argued on June 13.
“Based upon the evidence before this court, we find that Chesterfield established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that withholding the names of undercover officers falls within the FOIA exemptions outlined in Virginia Code,” Pemberton wrote in her ruling.
Pemberton said that she didn’t find Minium had a “clear right to relief.” Her ruling indicated that she must balance transparency with “the safety and security of law-enforcement personnel and the general public.”
Her ruling also seemed hesitant to assign a definition to what it means to be “undercover” under Virginia law.
“Absent a statutory definition of ‘undercover,’ this Court finds that Chesterfield’s use of the FOIA exemptions outlined in Virginia Code … are proper,” Pemberton wrote.
The suit features an interpretive clash between two different parts of Virginia’s legal code: one part emphasizing the importance of government transparency and another allowing for redactions where a record might reveal “the staffing or logistics of undercover operations.”
Chesterfield County Attorney Jeffrey Mincks argued on the merits of the latter exemption. He came to the courtroom with a poster board of magnified text of the code section.
“The county on any given day can call any officer up to the rank of lieutenant and move them from their dedicated assignment to an undercover assignment and can do it for as long as it is needed,” Mincks argued at the bench trial in June.
Bodoh countered that officers would be using a fake name if they were undercover.
Under cross-examination, he asked the trial’s only witness, Chesterfield Police Major Andrea Riesmeyer, if a spreadsheet of police officer names would actually give her information on who was undercover.
“Pick a line where you see a name redacted. Now, if I had that name, would I thereby know whether that officer was staffing undercover operations?” Bodoh asked Riesmeyer.
“No,” she replied.
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Later, she added that because of the department’s policy, it would “prevent future assignments” for the officer.
Bodoh later revisited that point in his closing arguments to Pemberton.
“If I have the name of an officer, that doesn’t tell me whether or not they’ve been staffing undercover operations, whether they are, whether they will be in the future,” said Bodoh. “It doesn’t tell me that.”
Minium said she was prepared for Pemberton’s ruling, and indicated that she plans to appeal it. Last year, she also sued the Hanover County Sheriff’s Office in an identical case. Judge Patricia Kelly of the Hanover Circuit Court ruled in favor of the sheriff’s office.
She said she believes both agencies are enabling police misconduct.
“Secrecy shrouds, if not misconduct, the ability to engage in misconduct,” said Minium in a response to the Chesterfield ruling. “Not once in the history of time has anyone behaved better when exempt from public scrutiny than with it.”
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Luca Powell (804) 649-6103
lpowell@timesdispatch.com
@luca_a_powell on Twitter
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Luca Powell
Investigations and Criminal Justice Reporter
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