An attorney’s effort to compel the City of Cleveland to provide him with inciddent reports was rebuffed by the Ohio Supreme Court.

 Shaughnessy is an attorney whose practice focuses on recovering economic losses for crime victims through the Ohio Crime Victims Fund. He requests and reviews police incident reports and then sends information about the fund to individuals named in those reports who may be victims of crime.

Shaughnessy alleges that on five different occasions, Cleveland failed to produce copies of police incident reports in a reasonable amount of time, which he quantifies as eight business days. Cleveland produced copies of the requested records 12 to 31 business days after receipt of the initial requests. Shaughnessy submitted evidence showing that the cities of Akron, Canton, and Columbus have fulfilled his requests for police incident reports within four business days.

Shaughnessy typically requested police incident reports involving felonious assaults or other assaults causing serious harm but excluding those involving domestic violence, elder abuse or assault upon a minor. Cleveland’s evidentiary submission explained the steps involved in fulfilling his requests. Cleveland first had to search its database for reports that involved incidents of assaults or aggravated assaults and then exclude records involving the types of victims and offenses that Shaughnessy did not want. Then, to retrieve the actual reports, the records custodian typed each police-report number into Cleveland’s database to extract and print each individual report. Cleveland submitted each report to its law department for review and redaction of information that the law department deemed exempt from disclosure under the Public Records Act. The information typically redacted from reports included Social Security numbers, criminal information obtained from the National Crime Information Center and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the names of juveniles, medical information, and information describing the details of sexual offenses.

Shaughnessy also submitted supplemental evidence purporting to show that on three different occasions after he initiated this action, Cleveland was able to provide copies of responsive police incident reports within two to four business days after Cleveland printed each report. 

The records were eventually produced; the issue here was the timeliness of the response.

As to one faxed request

This was an improper public-records request, because it required Cleveland to do research for Shaughnessy and to identify a specific subset of records containing selected information. Cleveland had to search its database for reports that involved (1) incidents of “aggravated assaults” or “assaults,” (2) occurring within a specific geographical location, (3) with victims who sought medical care at a hospital, but (4) who were not victims of domestic violence. The Public Records Act does not compel a public office “to do research or to identify records containing selected information.”