Less transparency on crime in Alachua County as arrest reports are no longer available on weekends

OPINION

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

ALACHUA COUNTY, Fla. – Alachua Chronicle is one of only two or three media outlets in Alachua County that provide daily reporting on crime, and our reports are the most detailed by far, giving information from the probable cause narrative in the arrest report, the criminal history of the suspect, and bail amounts when available. We do this seven days a week.

However, we have learned that arrest reports will no longer be available on weekends.

We’ve only been covering arrests for a little over two years, but during that time, the process has been the same: Alachua County Jail staff send out a booking log every morning to a long list of media outlets, and outlets that want arrest reports send back a list of names. Those reports have generally been provided within a couple of hours, which is usually 3-4 hours before they start appearing on the court website.

However, that suddenly stopped on Thursday, when the arrest reports arrived at 2:30 p.m. (about the time they start showing up on the court website), sent by a supervisor, with each file marked “APPROVED.” When we asked about the delay, we were told that there was a new process, with a supervisor having to review each report before it is sent to the media.

On Friday, the requested arrest reports never arrived.

When we asked about that today, we were told that the supervisors were not in the office yesterday, and they don’t work on weekends, so the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday reports will all be reviewed and sent out Monday. Since arrest reports are also not posted to the court website on weekends, this greatly diminishes the community’s awareness of crimes happening over the weekend.

On top of the delay, outlets don’t have the resources to write/publish/broadcast three times the number of crime stories on Mondays, so this has the effect of diminishing crime reporting by almost 25%. Stories that would otherwise be covered will not be covered. This week, because reports were also not sent on Friday, four days of arrest reports will be sent on Monday, assuming the supervisors can actually review that many on top of their usual responsibilities.

The first day this happened was also the day that a local basketball coach was arrested for lewd and lascivious battery on a minor, and we can certainly understand the desire to double-check the redactions in such a report to ensure that no personal information about the victims was transmitted, but it seems unnecessary to put arrest reports for DUIs, trespasses, driving without a valid license, and drug possession through this approval process.

It’s also notable that two sons of Sheriff Clovis Watson, Jr., were arrested in the past 10 days (Clovis Watson IV here and Cortlan Watson here), but both arrest reports were promptly provided to the media upon request, and the only redaction was in Cortlan’s home address (not uncommon for relatives of law enforcement officers).

We call on Sheriff Watson to once again provide arrest reports to the media every morning, as has been done for years. Media outlets follow ethical standards in posting information about victims, and if the jail staff accidentally neglect to redact some information, ethical news outlets do not publish it.

Knowing that the jail is struggling with staff shortages, it also seems counterproductive to add extra work to the staff when there seems to be little, if any, benefit from that extra work.

In a time when law enforcement agencies are increasingly under attack from political forces, it is important for the community to know what our law enforcement officers do on a daily basis. Crime stories that give the “who, what, when, where, and why” of interactions between law enforcement and suspects inform all of us about what happens in Alachua County every day and can guide policy-makers to implement changes that can make our community safer. They can also provide a starting point for investigations into policing policies. Without these stories, we would be ignorant about incidents happening around us, and perhaps that is what our local leadership wants.

Other than redactions to protect victims, arrest reports are public records, and the only effect of delaying their release is to make information about crime in our community less transparent and less timely. And that does not benefit anyone except the criminals and politicians.