We believe it was a serious mistake for the Legislature to pass and Governor Hochul to sign a new law that requires agencies to inform employees – and possibly former employees – if their disciplinary records have been requested via a Freedom of Information Law request.
The law’s sponsors say it is a benign and reasonable mandate that will not change how FOIL requests are processed. We completely disagree.
This is not a straw breaking the FOIL camel’s back – it’s a ten-ton weight.
Reinvent Albany has spent the last decade-plus analyzing New York’s FOIL process. We have published numerous reports that show agency FOIL processes are grossly underfunded, understaffed, politicized, and overwhelmed by the volume of requests. Both we and other transparency and journalism organizations have repeatedly shown that it takes months and sometimes years for agencies to provide the requested records, and even then those records are often incomplete.
The law’s sponsors wrongly assume that agency FOIL officers have up-to-date contact information for current and former agency employees at their fingertips. They don’t. The sponsors also wrongly assume that FOIL requesters mainly ask for the records of individual current and former employees rather than the disciplinary records of potentially large groups of employees. We are familiar with many FOIL requests that ask police, fire, or prison agencies for all employee disciplinary records for certain time periods, for instance 2010 to 2020. Under this new law, agencies getting such a request would potentially have to notify hundreds of current and former employees that their disciplinary records were requested.
We find it disappointing that this bad bill – which reduces transparency – is the only FOIL legislation passed by both the Senate and Assembly this session. The Legislature chose to ignore four bills strengthening FOIL that were supported by over 30 groups.
We believe the lawmakers who championed the repeal of 50-a will greatly regret voting for this new law, which is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and rolls back much of what they fought so hard for.
Below is a list of the groups that urged Governor Hochul to veto this step backward on transparency and police accountability:
Reinvent Albany
Citizens Union
Common Cause New York
Freedom of the Press Foundation
League of Women Voters of New York State
The Legal Aid Society
New York News Publishers Association
New York Civil Liberties Union
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.)
Timber