Madison assistant city attorney Roger Allen has apologized for the police department taking more than a year to fulfill an open records request from Isthmus, saying the request accidentally “fell through the cracks.” He says the city is working to make sure that delays like this won’t happen again.
“This [delay] was an outlier and, quite frankly, was embarrassing both to the records section in MPD and to my office,” Allen tells Isthmus.
The request for police records was made in December 2016 but not filled until after Isthmus and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a lawsuit on Feb. 1, 2018. The city then turned over the records, which resulted in the March 8 article “Shielded.” The piece examined how the police department handled an internal investigation of Officer Stephen Heimsness.
Tom Kamenick, deputy counsel and open government specialist for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, or WILL, calls the settlement a victory for public access to government records.