And they use the same ludicrous menu of trickery as everyone else—they turn to slowrolling (taking forever to answer requests in hopes that the requester will simply give up); they charge ridiculous and arbitrary high fees for information; they redact documents excessively; and they insist falsely that they need city attorney permission to release information requested.
They’ve been using these ruses and chicanery for years—and getting away with it.
But, this time, they messed with the wrong guy.
“Public records are one of the few tools that everyday citizens have to shine a light on government.”
Tyler Foster, 23, doesn’t have an ounce of “quit” in him.
He is not an attorney—not yet anyway. He’s a law student, who actually served several months in jail as a young man.
It looked like a sad and early end for the career of the then 19-year-old, but he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. While incarcerated, he spent time as a “jailhouse lawyer,” helping other prisoners with their cases, and found a love of law and what it could accomplish. Today, he attends the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law on a full scholarship, and serves as the president of the Transformative Justice Initiative, a board member of Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network and vice president of the Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope, a grassroots social justice group.
“I was raised by a strong single mother who taught me the value of compassion, perseverance and hard work,” said Foster. “I spent years in the restaurant and hospitality industries, often juggling two or three jobs at once. The hours were long, the work was physical and the pay was low, but those jobs taught me discipline, adaptability and a work ethic I still carry with me today.”
Growing up in poverty, Foster learned to never give up. So when he encountered opposition to his request to view public records, he rolled up his sleeves and went after the bureaucrats.
And he won.
In July, Foster filed a lawsuit against the City of Memphis. After months spent waiting, his five requests for information on disciplinary actions against local police officers had gone nowhere.
“Public records are one of the few tools that everyday citizens have to shine a light on government operations and understand what is going on,” Foster said. “Over the course of seven months, I had submitted several public records requests pertaining to Memphis Police Department officers, namely officers who have been involved in local controversies. The city ultimately refused to turn over any disciplinary records, and told me they would not work toward coming to a constructive resolution.”
“Mr. Foster brings this action to vindicate the public’s statutory right of access under the Tennessee Public Records Act (TPRA), to enforce the clear mandates of state law and to enjoin the City of Memphis from continuing to engage in unlawful records practices,” reads Foster’s lawsuit.
Memphis authorities charged inflated fees, ignored labor cost limits, marked requests as “fulfilled” while producing no documents, and illegally conditioned the release of information on city attorney approval, Foster said.
He further charged that the city was “imposing costs for records that had already been retrieved, reviewed, redacted and released to a prior requester, thereby engaging in impermissible double-billing.”
City attorneys claimed delays and obstruction were caused by bureaucrats’ confusion and overloads, but Chancellor Melanie Taylor Jefferson sided with Foster and ordered the city to provide the records he had requested and pay $277.90 in legal costs.
His lawsuit could have far-reaching implications.
Clutch Justice, a self-described “independent, grassroots news desk committed to exposing systemic injustice,” said the precedent could “stop cities from charging unlawful fees for public records, force Memphis to honor the state’s ‘presumption of openness’” and “empower journalists, families and reform advocates with the information they need to expose misconduct.”
The Church of Scientology has a long and proud history of taking government agencies to task who are attempting to withhold information from the public, while forcing the burden of proof onto those agencies to demonstrate why they are refusing to furnish documents.
As Foster put it: “If the public can’t access records about … misconduct, how can we know whether misconduct is being addressed at all?”
