Nate Monroe: Jacksonville's secret police and an $87,401 invoice for public records

COMMENTARY | I have to start with the cost: $87,401.

Eighty-seven thousand four-hundred and one dollars: That is what the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office wanted to charge Times-Union partner First Coast News before officials would even begin working on what should have been a routine and basic request for public records housed on the agency's servers. JSO actually invoiced that amount. 

"Payment must be made within 30 calendar days or the request will be considered withdrawn, closed and no further action will be taken on this request," the office helpfully added.

Dwell again for a moment on that figure: $87,401.

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Anne Schindler, an executive producer at the station, was following up late last month on an excellent story she had recently broken — about a list maintained by the State Attorney's Office of Jacksonville cops who can't be trusted, and a police officer who was, remarkably, removed from the list for unclear reasons. Her request to JSO was entirely reasonable; perhaps there were emails traded between JSO officials, prosecutors and judges about why Sgt. J.C. Nobles, a 20-year veteran with a lengthy record of complaints, was removed from the problem-cop list.

Anne asked the agency to search for any emails containing several key words from accounts belonging to a little more than a dozen different officials. This is the sort of thing reporters ask for and receive all the time from different public agencies in Florida, often in broader terms than Anne had requested, and it's the kind of request public officials can frequently fulfill at no cost.

Anne, however, wisely anticipated that JSO would try to charge her for the records. Florida law allows — but does not require — agencies to charge a reasonable amount for requests that could take time and resources to fulfill, and JSO rarely misses a chance to do so. To be fair to JSO, police records generally contain more non-public information that needs to be redacted than the typical government agency, which means it generally takes public-records officials in police departments longer to work through requests.

So Anne worked with my boss, Times-Union Executive Editor Mary Kelli Palka, to make sure her records request was as narrowly tailored and specific as possible to cut down on the amount of work it would take JSO to search its servers.

JSO began throwing up roadblocks immediately.

First, before the agency would even provide a cost estimate for searching for the records, JSO required Anne to provide them with the email addresses of the judges and police-union officials she wanted them to look for on their own servers. Local agencies can search through email by keywords and names, so this was entirely unnecessary and inappropriate.

Were it not a veteran investigative reporter like Anne asking for the records and instead, say, the family member of someone recently victimized, how would they know how to track down the email address for some scold in the local police union or the chief judge of the judicial circuit? JSO has a legal obligation to search for records if they can discern what the requester is looking for, even if it's not listed in the most minute detail. 

But Anne was a good sport and provided the email addresses. That was when JSO provided her the invoice for $87,401.

No work would begin until that amount was paid in full and within 30 days.

The agency, which only communicates through an email portal, can take several days to respond to messages, making back-and-forth haggling over records particularly taxing even for people paid to do this full time.

Last week, Anne came back to the agency with a second, significantly more narrow request: This time, she scaled back her request by about 94 percent, but JSO was still demanding a gouging payment — $11,497.54 — before it would start any work.

The records request remains unresolved.

JSO's contempt for private citizens

Consider what it says about an agency's attitude toward private citizens when it's comfortable sending out an $87,000 invoice for public records in the first place. It's behavior that appalls other public officials in Jacksonville, though they are reluctant to publicly say so.

And it's not the first time JSO has done it.

In July 2017, JSO tried to charge $314,000 for a batch of records requested by the attorney representing the family of a pedestrian who was hit and killed by an officer with his police cruiser. A public-records expert told the newspaper at the time the cost estimate "stinks."

“When they want you to have it, you get it,” she said. “When they don’t want you to have it, you have to go through hell and back to get it.”

More:JSO wants family to pay $314K for public records after officer killed pedestrian

Weaponizing the cost-loophole in Florida's public-records law allows JSO to tightly control the narrative when its officers are scrutinized for shooting or injuring citizens. In the 2017 case, JSO officials told the media the pedestrian who had been struck and killed by a cop was potentially homeless and suicidal; neither was true, and the family considered it a grievous smear (the family's lawsuit against the department, which was initially filed in Duval County court and later moved to federal court, remains unresolved).

In the hours, weeks, months and, sometimes, years after such killings, JSO frequently releases little to no information, meaning one must enter the department's fraught public-records pipeline to even begin figuring out the truth behind the often complicated encounters between Jacksonville cops and the public. That allows JSO the chance to significantly color the public's view of a suspect or the facts of a police shooting long before anyone might know to be skeptical of the department's characterizations.

And when the records finally are provided, occasionally at great financial cost to the requester, they are sometimes redacted so heavily — and at times inappropriately — little can be discerned about what took place.

Sometimes, there simply are no records.

That was the case for a troubling episode last summer when an inmate in the Duval County jail, who was set to be released, died after an alleged fight with guards. The circumstances remain mysterious, in no small part because JSO has refused to answer any questions about the death and because, a JSO spokesperson told the Times-Union and WJCT in a joint investigation last month, there are no records documenting the guards' use of force against the inmate, even though such records are generally required.

A JSO incident report only had this to say: “Officers became involved in physical altercation with an inmate. The inmate became unresponsive.”

JSO takes other steps to obstruct the routine public reporting about crime in Jacksonville.

Sheriff Mike Williams' predecessor, John Rutherford, who is now a member of Congress, shut down the ability of reporters and citizens to monitor police communications on scanners, meaning the public relies on self-reported notices posted by JSO about police shootings, homicides or other crimes.

Often those notices are delayed by hours or days; sometimes they never materialize.

In the cases JSO does provide a timely notice to the media of, say, a homicide, the police often cordon off the crime scene for several blocks or more, closing the media out of the neighborhoods in which the crime took place.

And the question-and-answer sessions with the JSO official on scene are rarely illuminating. More often, they are Kafkaesque: I have been in news conferences where the JSO spokesperson was reluctant to just confirm a person had been shot.

This is from an actual exchange between JSO and the media after a shooting a few years ago:

Q: Was the person shot?

A: It’s too early in the investigation to tell.

Q: Anything about the victim?

A: I cannot release that information.

... 

Q: Can you tell me what street it was on?

A: I cannot.

Tracking a single police shooting

I randomly chose a case from JSO's police-shooting database, which the department has touted as a proactive effort to be more transparent with the public, to test the limits of what JSO is willing to disclose about the conduct of its officers.

On July 26, 2020, officer Myers Kampfe, who had been on the force about a year, shot 21-year-old Darrell Paige while attempting to arrest him for a series of traffic violations.

Already we know more about this police shooting than is typical: JSO, citing a law passed by voters in 2018, now routinely redacts the names of cops who shoot citizens, meaning that information never becomes public.

But there are still huge gaps in the publicly available JSO and court records about this particular police shooting. In short, JSO deputies alleged Paige had been driving recklessly one night and led the police on a car chase. When the police disabled his car, which was packed with seven people, Paige allegedly fled on foot.

At some point, Kampfe shot Paige in the leg, though it's unclear why based on information in the database, the arrest report or what JSO had previously told the media. The night of the shooting, a JSO chief told reporters there was no more information to relay about why Paige had been shot or whether he had a weapon.

The arrest report, filed in the court record, makes no mention at all of the fact that Kampfe shot Paige, only noting obliquely that, "Due to the injuries sustained during Paige's apprehension, he was transported to UF Health ..."

JSO's database indicates Paige in fact had no weapon that night.

The database lists the shooting as having been "within policy" but that "further situational training" was required — though there is no indication why or what the training was, or how a shooting could be within policy but still require training for the cop who fired the shot.

The database shows the State Attorney filed a form letter clearing the officer of criminal conduct for the shooting, with no details about why.

One year and nine months after Kampfe shot Paige, the database lists JSO's public statements about the shooting as "pending."

It says details from the response-to-resistance board hearing — a departmental review triggered by police shootings — is likewise "pending."

There is no record of any body camera footage or any indication why there is none, even though activating body cameras during such pursuits was JSO policy at the time.

Police charged Paige with four offenses; prosecutors quickly dropped two. Paige ultimately pleaded guilty to just one: fleeing police, for which he got 13 months.

Nowhere in the court record does it mention that he was shot.

In this particular case, we know a bit more about what happened and why because reporters previously requested the full State Attorney's report, though it too raises a few questions.

The cops on scene alleged Paige ignored Kampfe's commands and led him on a foot chase down a dark alley behind a strip mall. Kampfe attempted to use a Taser on Paige but he allegedly broke free of the probes. Paige allegedly turned "abruptly" toward the cop holding a dark object Kampfe believed to be a gun, prompting him to shoot; it was actually a phone.

"Officer Kampfe’s mistaken belief that Paige had a gun does not mean his use of deadly force was not justified," the state attorney report concluded.

The statements from Kampfe and his fellow officers make up the bulk of the evidence in the case because Kampfe, in violation of JSO policy, did not turn on his body camera, though prosecutors claim that violation was "inconsequential because the body-worn camera fell off Officer Kampfe’s uniform during the foot chase."

There is body-camera footage of the car chase before the shooting (it's not clear which officer that camera belonged to), and another officer on scene did activate his camera but only after the shooting, the state attorney's report said. If prosecutors decided to scrutinize this curious series of coincidences, the report does not indicate they did so.

So there is no footage of the critical moments that were under scrutiny.

JSO a black box agency

The brazenness of JSO's stonewalling is sometimes breathtaking.

I was shocked listening to testimony last year from a consultant the Jacksonville City Council had hired to assist a special workshop on police reform. JSO, the consultant said, notified her she would need to file a public records request just to obtain information as basic as a demographic breakdown of the department — a blatant display of disrespect toward the council and the only timid effort by City Hall to consider any meaningful changes to the way policing is done in the largest city by area in the lower 48.

The workshop predictably imploded after a meeting in which a Republican City Council member who was open to a single watered-down reform — the creation of a citizens' "policy review board" — was spotted getting an earful from JSO's director of investigations, who was visibly unhappy with the workshop meetings.

That hostility toward the public has not stopped city officials from shoving an ever-increasing sum at JSO each year, finally topping $500 million in this year's budget, to the disgust of the few engaged members of the public who keep an eye on JSO. The agency's financials are similarly impenetrable: It can be expensive and difficult to probe the particulars of JSO's massive budget to determine, for example, if the agency is purchasing software to spy on people who participate in local protests.

JSO keeps Williams incredibly insulated from the public. Throughout his two terms, which are nearing an end, he has been the least accessible of Jacksonville's big three — Mayor Lenny Curry and State Attorney Melissa Nelson are far easier to reach — though he maintains vast power over Duval citizens.

And in the past few years, as police reform has taken a front-and-center role in political debates, Williams has seemed to even more dramatically recede from public view.

"I have called this number probably 10 times in the past five to six months and I have not received any return calls," a leader of ICARE, a prominent local group of ministers and faith leaders that support criminal justice reform, told the Times-Union earlier this year, of efforts to reach Williams over the course of several months.

After six months of unreturned calls, Williams met with ICARE leaders in March, only to tell them he was not interested in implementing an adult civil citation program for lesser offenses and would not meet with Nelson, the state attorney, over it.

He declined to participate in ICARE's annual assembly — an event at which mayors and other public officials have attended for years — but told the Times-Union, through a spokesperson, he would meet with the group in the future "if warranted." 

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.