An appeals court Wednesday said the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office improperly withheld public records related to a program targeting “problem people” and “at-risk youths” and is required to pay the attorney fees of a group that sought the records.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal sided with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Florida, which filed a lawsuit in September 2022 seeking to force the sheriff’s office to provide records related to what was known as the “Intelligence Led Policing” program. The program included analyzing various types of information and compiling lists of “problem people” and “at-risk youths” who would get increased law-enforcement attention, according to Wednesday’s ruling.
The sheriff’s office announced in spring 2023 that it would discontinue the program, which was the subject of investigative stories published in 2020 by the Tampa Bay Times. When it discontinued the program, the sheriff’s office said it would provide the disputed records to the group known as CAIR. The group argued the sheriff’s office also should pay its attorney fees because the records had been improperly withheld during the dispute.
A circuit judge rejected the request, but the appeals court ruled that the records had been improperly withheld — and that CAIR should be able to recoup fees. The 12-page ruling, written by Judge Stevan Northcutt and joined by Judges Morris Silberman and Edward LaRose, said, in part, that the state’s public-records law provides exemptions for “active criminal intelligence information” and “active criminal investigative information.”
But it said those exemptions did not apply in the case. “The information that the PSO (Pasco Sheriff’s Office) compiled and that CAIR requested clearly does not meet the definition of ‘active criminal investigative information,’ which applies only to information collected ‘in the course of conducting a criminal investigation of a specific act,’” the ruling said. “The ILP (Intelligence Led Policing) program was not itself a criminal investigation. And its purpose was to predict potential future offenders based on a variety of factors, not to investigate a specific act. Neither did CAIR’s records request seek ‘active criminal intelligence information.’”
–News Service of Florida
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