Judge Rules Police Can’t Charge Media Huge Fees for Vegas Massacre Information
WHAT is going on with this police department?!
The mystery around last year’s massacre in Las Vegas continues to deepen as a judge ruled that the Las Vegas police cannot charge huge fees to the media for information.
Yes, the police wanted to charge the media up to almost $500K for such info.
In February, Judge Richard Scotti ordered the department “to release all of the evidence from the Las Vegas mass shooting.” They have not done thing.
Instead, the police stated in a court brief that they want the media “to pay nearly $500,000 before the public gets access to hundreds of hours of video, 911 calls and upwards of 800 reports.”
Scotti said no:
“An excessive fee is the antithesis to government accountability,” the judge wrote in his decision. “The government cannot frustrate the Media’s efforts to obtain information on behalf of the public by charging exorbitant fees.”
Even the Associated Press has sued the police department. All of the media organizations have accused the department of violating public records laws.
Scotti noted that “it could take up to six months” for the police to comply with the order. Another hearing will take place this month that will involve an update on the order:
Records could shed light on the response by public agencies and emergency workers when the shooter opened fire for more than 10 minutes from 32nd-story windows of a casino hotel room into an open-air concert crowd of 22,000 people below.
The judge ruled that Las Vegas police can charge 81 cents a page for evidence logs and interview reports, including 31 cents a page for copying and 50 cents a page for staff time.
Scotti noted that police said there are almost 750 hours of body camera recordings from the shooting. The judge said police can recover copy costs for body camera footage and 911 audio recordings, including time to reproduce them and the cost of the DVD, flash drive, CD or other medium.
Media companies can also be billed for what the judge termed “pre-copy preparations” of incident dispatch logs.
Fifty-eight people died in October when, from the Mandalay Bay, Steve Paddock opened fire on a crowd of people. So far we have absolutely nothing, including a motive. Authorities have his laptop, but it does not have the hard drive.
But what is it with these officials? Last month, the coroner refused to comply with a court order release Paddock’s autopsy. He claimed he has not finalized the autopsy even though Paddock was cremated in December.
Everyone has remained confused over this massacre and a lot of that confusion has come from the police. Professor Jacobson noted the odd things about the shooting, including details about Paddock. Then the police changed the story on the timeline. A few days later, the department said the critical 6-minute shooting gap doesn’t exist.
Something tells me they’re just trying to save their booties.
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Comments
Well? Did the coroner explain himself, or are we just assuming that there cannot possibly have been a valid reason, such as toxicology tests? Enough time has passed that I think it is a fair question.
There should be a much lower cost for each duplicate copy. These costs seem to be for one copy of each document.
This guy is should have been running the FBI under obama and holder.
He’s perfect.
WTF, we taxpayers have paid for it already.
One can’t help but get the feeling there’s something in there that they’d rather the public didn’t know.
Betting on a CIAR/Muslim Brotherhood connection.
Something is not right here. Now you can but a terabyte of external memory is about $100. Copy everything to one and keep copying it over each time for $100. Who makes copies on paper anymore. Add to the cost the shared amount of time to assemble it and you have your price. This is too easy to accomplish.
Less than that, actually. I bought a 4 terabyte external USB drive last year for $150. I’ve seen Western Digital Passport 1 terabyte external drives for $59.
I have a WDP 1Tb drive setting about 3 feet from me, got it around Christmas on sale for 40 bucks.
“Who makes copies on paper anymore.”
Hillary Clinton and other members of the Clinton crime syndicate.
As has been pointed out many times, there were a lot of strange things with this shooting. More questions than answers, and the refusals for information just makes this a conspiracy haven.
Electronic copies should be what is mandated, the records have to all be on computer, so as Kevin stated above, just push it to an external drive for handout.
When government forces do things like this, you can be guaranteed there is something being covered up. I don’t understand how the police have his laptop without the hard drive… which adds another layer of questions.
Between this shooting and the Florida shooting, the police handling of both of these has been strange. Two huge public incidents that were handled incompetently at best, and seem to have both the agencies involved in doing some level of cover up. I understand lies coming from some to cover their poor actions, but this isn’t just individuals doing it, it is a lot of them, which smells to high heaven.
Betting on a CIAR/Muslim Brotherhood connection.
This claim of the cost of doing this is ridiculous.
In the first place, everything is in a digital format, now-a-days. So, “copying” it does not require having a person physically stand over a copy machine and run paper records through it. No paper, toner or time equals no cost. So the costs of transfer are minimal. As for the editing of body cam footage, this is not really necessary. Hopefully all of the footage has been reviewed by investigators and any irrelevant, objectionable footage, such an officer in a restroom, should have been identified and flagged. Editing it out should not take much time. There is no reason why most of the raw footage can not be released. Leave it up to the person receiving the footage to peruse it for content. Put a copy of all of this information on a stand alone computer and just plug in a mass storage device, provided by the person requesting the data. And finally, the department is not going to hire an outside agency to do any of this. They are going to use hourly employees whom they pay whether the employee is editing video or answering the phone. So, that cost is minimal.
It has been four months since the incident. There should be NO surprises in the reports or evidence by this time.
All of the (digitized) evidence/information/records should be in a single folder or file structure, with a backup somewhere else. There are devices that will make copies to multiple hard drives at the same time. All they have to do is put everything on a single drive on one computer, hook that computer up to a drive duplicator, and they could crank out 10 or so copies of that hard drive as quickly as the data can transfer. Charge the media for the drive and a nominal cost for the duplication. This should not be difficult!
I was about to say, it’s digital and at this point should be organized already. This isn’t even a full afternoons work for an intern.
Here is a link to the LVMPD investigative summary on the Pollard shooting case:
https://www.lvmpd.com/en-us/Documents/1_October_FIT_Report_01-18-2018_Footnoted.pdf .
Y’all can read it, if you are interested.
Policing has become a for-profit endeavor. This is an obvious and inevitable result.
I don’t know. If you approach it with the premise that the media is only going to use the information for outrage porn, clickbait for advertising, then follows to charge them through the nose for their Source material
No, it doesn’t and it violates the principles of good public service. I am no fan of the media but their place is given to them by the constitution and they have every right to the information that has been ordered by a judge to be given to them.
actually there place is protected by the constitution.
With this level of corruption and evil, is Harry Reid running Nevada?
My guess is that, much like the Broward County Sheriff deputies’ response in Parkland, the tapes and transcripts from Vegas are going to show a lot of cops setting up perimeters and preparing for a hostage rescue scenario while the shooter just blasts away. Likely there’s a bonus that the hotel security probably knew his position within a few minutes (via phone calls from people complaining about loud noises) but they couldn’t get the cops to budge off their script.
Your guess would be wrong.
Watch the video.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/us/las-vegas-attack-gunman-paddock.html
I watched it.
It took an hour and change for the police to go through the door.
As the judge in this case notes, it was ten minutes and a bit.
Better watch it again…
The timeline on the video you link says it was after 11:00 pm when they went through the door.
Shooting started a little after 10:00 pm.
The shooting ended a little over 10 minutes after it started, and cops were advancing on the killer.
Cops were in the hall, and clearing people out prior to breaching the door. They were not standing around.
While I won’t defend the costs the police are assigning to this, the filling of a public records request is far more than just copying something digitally onto a drive.
For example, here in Florida, there are over 11,000 (eleven thousand) exemptions to the full public disclosure of documents. Each document must be checked for any redactions that must be applied. Each document where an exemption is has to be applied (by law) must have the document redacted, checked for the correct redaction and also the Florida Statute which is being applied.
For example, take a simple report of a break in of a house that is witnessed by someone other than the home owner. Phone number get redacted. Social security number gets redacted. Driver’s license gets redacted. Certain identifying items of the LEO taking the report are redacted. It goes on and on and on.
For each redaction, there must be a citation for the redaction.
The time and costs add up and add up fast. (And don’t forget, here in Florida failure to supply a document under a PRR correctly can be a $500 fine. Failure to redact information correctly is a $500 fine as well. That means the job must be done perfectly the first time or else.)
Audio and video records are even harder to deal with and must be listened to and edited. Someone has to be doing that editing instead of the job for which they were hired to do.
Could the costs of the PRR have reached $500K?
Doubtful. Highly doubtful.
For the Sheriff’s office to put that figure out there assumes that they think the public and the media is naive. At the same time, thinking a $50 – $100 for a 1TB – 5TB drive as being the only costs involved is naive as well.
“thinking a $50 – $100 for a 1TB – 5TB drive as being the only costs involved is naive as well.”
Except no one said this, ever. The comment was made in response to the idiotic notion that pages still have to be copied individually and that a per page charge was moronic when the documents are digital.
In fact it has been mentioned several times by multiple people that a fair charge should be charged, i.e. cost of labor for whoever goes through the documents.
“For each redaction, there must be a citation for the redaction.
The time and costs add up and add up fast. (And don’t forget, here in Florida failure to supply a document under a PRR correctly can be a $500 fine. Failure to redact information correctly is a $500 fine as well. That means the job must be done perfectly the first time or else.)”
“Audio and video records are even harder to deal with and must be listened to and edited. Someone has to be doing that editing instead of the job for which they were hired to do.”
Yep which is why most large departments have people who specialize in doing just those things, and they do I checked, who should have been put on getting the document dump ready the moment the reasonable and legal request was received. If that didn’t happen because the department wanted to play games that is on them and they deserve no extra time or money for their own unconstitutional actions.
The media should pool their money and pay the reasonable fees then put the info in the public domain for all to see and hear.
Maybe I’m not frequenting the right news sites, but I’m rather amazed that there isn’t a lot of rumor-swirling going on; not that I’ve come across, anyway.
Nobody claiming inside info from the usual sources speaking anonymously, or persons familiar with the investigation, or persons in a position to know, or any of that. Strange.
OT but no mention on this site of Trump’s gun proposals yesterday, which look a lot like encouraging other states to participate in the Florida gin grab. ‘Bearing Arms’ is no longer on the blog | Read list too. What’s the deal?
https://www.redstate.com/patterico/2018/03/12/good-trump-afraid-nra/
…and, yes, he’d better be afraid of the NRA and EVERY gun rights outfit.
Fiction brings big money
Fiction brings big money
Thats and very idealistic and naive position.
Ok, I used to do this to, when you click in from an e-mail to reply you have to hit the reply button on the comment again or your post just gets added as a new post at the bottom and no one knows who you were addressing.