A media company — Appen Media, which publishes the local newspaper Sandy Springs Crier — submitted an open records request for certain police incident reports for cases still under investigation. The City produced certain reports but did not include narrative reports because it classified them as “supplemental reports” that were exempt from disclosure under the Act. Instead, the City claimed it was required to produce only the summary reports as the “initial incident reports” required under the Act.
To determine whether the narrative reports were subject to disclosure, the Court needed to define “initial incident reports.”
With these principles in mind, the most natural and reasonable meaning of “initial incident report” is the first incident report completed by a law enforcement officer on a standard incident report form when beginning a criminal investigation.
As to the narrative reports at issue, the Court could not determine as a matter of law that they were included or excluded as “initial incident reports.” So the Court remanded the case for the trial court to determine whether the reports qualified as “initial incident reports.”
Notably, a concurring opinion by Judge McFadden provides the following:
The City has adopted a practice of providing only a short, one- or-two sentence narrative in that space in the first incident report filed and including in it very little other information. Instead, the City includes the full narrative in a subsequent report which is filed thereafter — at least sometimes immediately thereafter. Those subsequent reports, the City contends and the majority agrees, are not “initial incident reports” and so not subject to the Open Records Act. I would hold that this practice is an improper circumvention of the Act and that the responding officer’s full narrative about his or her initial response to the incident also constitutes an “initial incident report” subject to disclosure under the Act.
