Wednesday, April 7, 2010

FOIA in South Carolina






Winthrop mass communication professor, Larry Timbs, has a clever way to avoid submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) forms.

“My approach to people not giving me information was to say ‘If you don’t give me what is entailed under law, I will write an editorial asking what you are keeping hidden,’” Timbs said. “I had the power of the press worked in small communities and the agency didn’t want people against them.”

However, Timbs found that communities in states like Kentucky and Iowa were much more open with their information than in South Carolina.

“Every year at the school I went to in Iowa, the student newspaper printed several pages of everyone’s salary,” He said. “At Winthrop, everything is very ‘hush, hush.’ I have filed two FOIAs since I have been down here.”

A woman from Orangeburg, S.C. was refused the incident report that involved a traffic accident her daughter was involved in. Since the mother was not the victim, she wasn’t allowed to receive the incident report even though she owns the property where her daughter lives, according to an article from Times and Democrat.

However, the South Carolina FOIA says law enforcement incident reports are public information and are available whenever the public requests one.

“Any member of the public can look at police incident reports,” said South Carolina Press Association Executive Director Bill Rogers. “Law enforcement is allowed to take some highly personal information, such as the names of rape victims and undercover operations, but they can’t take out everything.”

Another issue dealing with South Carolina information laws is the Department of Transportation keeping secret incident reports from how many wrecks occur on damanged high ways.



The department said damage claims are being taken the number of claims and the cost to taxpayers doesn't have to be released under the state's open records laws.

However, the South Carolina Press Association said attorney-client privillage has nothing to do with the number of claims and this information can be released.

From looking at the cases, it seems that South Carolina is much more guarded with their information than other states.