Does freedom of information set all the facts free?

Frontiersman editorial board

In America, information is free. Or at least it's supposed to be. Of course, it is America, and we all know nothing is really free. It costs more than a dollar for a bottle of water, and you even have to pay to put air in your tires at many gas stations. It's a quarter for air. If anything should be free in a democracy, however, it ought to be information. The Freedom of Information Act, upheld by the highest court in the land, guarantees the public's right to know certain things.

As it turns out, however, some information is not free, after all. Some of that information you don't have a right to see is about agencies that are funded with public money. They are agencies sworn to serve and protect, and we pay them to do those things. We buy the cars they drive around in, the uniforms they wear and even the paper they write on. The law says that even though we buy the paper our police agencies write their information on, we do not necessarily have a right to review all of that information.

In Alaska, the law says that if a police agency creates a log of its daily activities, they are obligated to share that information with the public. If the agency does not create such a log, the public has no access to the information. That means that if the police department in your community does not produce a daily activities log, you do not have access to information about how many calls, or the nature of those calls, that department responds to on a day-to-day basis. You have no way to find out about what kind of crimes may be happening in your neighborhood, unless the agency chooses to share that information. They may choose to share it, and they may not.

When an agency is funded by public funds, and when that agency exists to serve the public, we should have access to as much information as is reasonable. At a time when police may need more funding for additional officers or resources, shouldn't the public that pays for those increases have as much information as possible to help make that decision?

We have a right to know how our legislators vote and who funds their campaigns, shouldn't we also know what our police officers are doing and what crimes they respond to in our neighborhoods?