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»> BETTY JEAN CRAIGE LECTURE A
WITH AUTHOR
COMPASS Lecture
by Poet and Publisher
E PLURIBUS UNUM
REFLECTIONS ON
IMMIGRATION IN AMERICA
IN MUSIC AND VISUAL ART
CONVERSATION WITH
Willson Center for
Humanities & Arts
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
GLOBAL GEORGIA
UPCOMING PUBLIC EVENTS
The 2021 Global Georgia Initiative public events series begins in
February and continues throughout the Spring semester. All events
are virtual and open to the public, but require advance registration.
More events will be added to the series as they are confirmed.
Full schedule and details at willson.uga.edu
CONVERSATION WIIH
LIZA STEPANOVA,
BADIE KHALEGHIAN
REINALDO MOYA &
KEVORKMOURAD
MUSICIAN
VAL JEANTY &
t. AUTHOR
RENEE GLADMAN t
March 18 4pm
WRITING SOCIALLY
ENGAGED FICTION
VI EG HA MAJUMDAR
March 25 4:30pm
TRANSLATION AS A
LITERARY TROPE
Jee Leong Koh
Residential • Office • Construction • Move In • Move Out
Adilene Valencia
706-424-9810
A clean house is
like a 4-leaf
clover: hard to find
& lucky to have!
aecleanathens@gmail.com
The Foilies 2021
continued from p. 6
Fusion centers are part of a controversial program
coordinated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
to facilitate the flow of intelligence among agencies. Each
fusion center is maintained by a state or regional agency; in
this case, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Klippenstein tweeted that the agency wouldn’t provide doc
ument titles or any other information, all the while adding
the dreaded black redaction bars to bulleted lists through
out the records. But if officials redacted the bullet points in
earnest, we wonder: What is the security risk if the public
learns whether Minnesota homeland security officials use
the default bullet points or some more exotic style or font?
Will the terrorists win if we know they used Wingdings?
The Juking the FOIA Stats Award:
Centers for Disease Control
“The Wire,” the classic HBO police drama, laid bare how
police departments across the country manipulate data to
present trends about crime being down. As ex-detective
Roland Pryzbylewski put it: “Juking the stats... Making rob
beries into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the
stats, and majors become colonels.”
The Centers for Disease Control seems to love to juke
its FOIA stats. As the nonprofit advocacy organization
American Oversight alleged in a lawsuit last year, the CDC
has been systematically rejecting FOIA requests by claim
ing they are overly broad or burdensome, despite years of
court decisions requiring agencies to work in good faith
with requesters to try to help them find records or narrow
their request. The CDC then categorizes those supposedly
overbroad requests as “withdrawn” by the requester and
closes the file without having to provide any records. So
those FOIAs disappear, much like the violent crime reports
in “The Wire.”
The CDC’s annual FOIA reports show that the agency’s
two-step juke move is a favorite. According to American
Oversight, between 2016 and 2019, CDC closed between
21-31% of all FOIA requests it received as “withdrawn.”
CDC’s closure rate during that period was roughly three
times that of its parent agency, the Department of Health
and Human Services, which on average only closed 6-10%
of its FOIAs as withdrawn. After American Oversight sued,
the CDC began releasing documents.
The Secret GOVID Statistics Award: North
Carolina Department of Health and Human Services
University in Lawrence, KS, started putting questions to
his school’s administration and sending records requests
to the local police department, he got a lot more than he
expected: A directive from his school’s president demanding
he cease his requests in the name of the student paper and
henceforth treat officials with proper respect, lest he face
disciplinary action.
“Your behavior has discredited you and this univer
sity,” Haskell Indian Nations University President Ronald
Graham wrote.”You have compromised your credibility
within the community and, more importantly, you have
brought yourself, The Indian Leader, Haskell, and me unwar
ranted attention.”
Graham’s aggressive tactics against the college junior
quickly rallied support for the student journalist, with the
Native American Journalists Association, Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, and Student Press Law
Center all calling for the formal directive to be rescinded.
The school ultimately did back down, but the efforts left
Nally shocked. “As a student journalist, I’d only been doing
it for a year,” he told Poynter in an interview. “When some
body in authority says things like that about you, it really
does take a hit... I’d say I’m recovering from the gaslighting
effects and feeling like what I’m doing really is every bit a
part of journalism.”
In February 2019, a swarm of Chicago police officers
raided the wrong apartment with their guns drawn. They
handcuffed the resident, Anjanette Young, who was com
pletely undressed, and they refused to let her put on clothes
as she pleaded with them dozens of times that they had
the wrong house. Young sued the city in federal court and
filed a request for body camera footage of the officers who
invaded her home. The local CBS affiliate also requested the
body camera footage.
The Chicago Police Department denied both requests,
despite a binding ruling just months earlier that CPD was
required to turn over body camera footage to people like
Young who were involved in the recorded events. Young
ultimately got the footage as part of her lawsuit, and her
attorney provided them to the media. The city’s lawyers
then took the extraordinary step of asking the court to
order CBS 2 not to air the video, a demand to censor speech
before it occurs called a “prior restraint.” The judge denied
the city’s request.
The city also sought sanctions against Young’s attorney,
but the city withdrew its motion, and Chicago Mayor Lori
Lightfoot called the request “ill-advised” in a letter to the
court. The judge decided not to sanction Young’s attorney.
Seeking a better understanding of the toll of COVID-
19 in the early days of the pandemic, journalists in North
Carolina requested copies of death certificates from local
county health departments. Within days, officials from the
state Department of Health and Human Services reached
out to county offices with guidance not to provide the
requested records—without citing any legal justification
whatsoever. DHHS did not respond to reporters’ questions
about why it issued that guidance or how it was justified.
Some local agencies followed the guidance and withheld
records, some responded speedily, and some turned them
over begrudgingly—emphasis on the grudge.
“I will be making everyone in Iredell County aware
through various means available; that you are wanting
all these death records with their loved ones’ private
information!” one county official wrote to The News &
Observer reporters in an email. “As an elected official, it is
relevant the public be aware of how you are trying to bully
the county into just giving you info from private citizens
because you think you deserve it.”
The Eric Gartman Respect My Authoritah
Award: Haskell Indian Natinns University
When Jared Nally, editor-in-chief of the Indian
Leader, the student newspaper at Haskell Indian Nations
The Save the Children (in a Hidden Folder)
Award: Louisville Metropolitan Police Department
The Louisville Metropolitan Police Department’s
Explorer Scouts program was supposed to give teenagers a
chance to learn more about careers in law enforcement. For
two LMPD officers, though, it became an opportunity for
sexual abuse. When reporters asked for more information
on the perpetrators, the city chose to respond with further
absurdity—by destroying its records. The case against the
city and the Boy Scouts of America is scheduled to begin in
April.
The Courier-Journal in Louisville first asked LMPD in
mid-2019 for all records regarding the two officers’ sexual
abuse of minors. Louisville claimed it didn’t have any; they
had been turned over to the FBI. Then the Courier-Journal
appealed, and the city eventually determined that, what do
you know, they’d found a “hidden folder” still containing
the responsive records—738,000 of them, actually. Not
for long, though. Less than a month later, they’d all been
deleted, despite the ongoing request, a casualty of the
city’s automated backup and deletion system, according to
Louisville.
At the end of 2020, the Courier-Journal was still fight
ing the city’s failure to comply with the Kentucky Open
Records Act. “I have practiced open records law since the
10 FLAGPOLE.COM | MARCH 17, 2021