Author Of Police Shooting Law Questions Plan To Redact Parts Of Investigations

The author of a state law mandating independent investigations of all officer-involved deaths says an amendment to the state budget violates the intent of the law.

The budget amendment approved by the Joint Finance committee last week requires redacting all information from police-involved death investigations that isn’t subject to the open records balancing test. That test allows officials to withhold some information in the public interest.

Madison Democratic Sen. Chris Taylor, co-author of the bill, said she deliberately excluded any reference to the balancing test in the law, “because we did not want the investigators to be able to withhold pieces of the investigative report.”

“We wanted it — with the exception of any kind of identifying information — to be released in its entirety,” added Taylor. “That was the point of the law.”

Attorney General Brad Schimel said the change won’t affect how much information is made public. He said it was necessary to make clear that the report won’t include things like the home addresses of police officers involved in the death.

This year, the State Division of Criminal Investigation has released three investigative reports analyzing incidents where police shot and killed a crime suspect. All of them are littered with blacked-out names, email and home addresses, and in some cases license plate numbers, to protect the privacy of police officers and witnesses that investigators interviewed to compile the report.

Taylor said the law already allowed those kind of redactions, so it’s not clear why the budget amendment referring to the balancing test was necessary.