"Victims" Law Stuns Alaskan Press   

Statute to shield victims is blocking news of crime.

"Victims' rights" sentiment, growing in intensity across the country, has strained the often uneasy alliance between the police and the press over access to crime reports and files. Alaska provides a case study of the worsening situation.

With press organizations not paying much attention, the Alaska legislature this year passed the Victims' Rights Act, demonstrating the potency of the issue in U.S. politics. A key part of the new law is a set of restrictions guaranteeing confidentiality to crime victims and witnesses.

The legislature said its aim was "to protect victims and witnesses to crime from risk of harassment, intimidation, and unwarranted invasion of privacy by prohibiting the unnecessary disclosure of their addresses and telephone numbers."

No matter what the crime, the law states that the home or business addresses and telephone numbers of every victim and witness must be kept confidential. If the crime involved kidnapping, rape or any other sexual assault, child sexual abuse, incest, or indecent exposure, the name of the victim will also remain secret.

Those bits of information, however, are the very stuff of solid crime reporting. Placing them under a veil of secrecy could destroy a news organization's ability to monitor the myriad incidents of crime.

What happened next was no great surprise. The first official reaction in the courthouses and police stations was not simply to delete the specified details now considered confidential. Instead, with panic setting in, officials began cutting off the flow of crime news.

It had an immediate effect. Editors at the Anchorage Daily News , for example, discovered they could not continue to publish crime data in its regular feature, "Monday Briefing."

If the Alaska Supreme Court had gotten its way, the situation would have been even worse. Soon after the Victims' Rights Act was passed, the court announced a six-week ban on public and press access to any pending criminal case. Fortunately for the press, public pressure forced the court to withdraw the ban a day later.

Meanwhile, Alaska's press, stunned to discover not only that there was a new law but that it was being applied so broadly, protested loudly and scrambled its lawyers into action.

"These are public records, paid for with public funds, and we have a right to see what the police are doing," says Anchorage Times Managing Editor Paul Jenkins. "We don't have such a great relationship with the [Anchorage] police department. They have used this law as an excuse to keep the records from us."

The attorney for the Times and other press organizations persuaded the state courts to reopen files on past cases and to apply the confidentiality requirements only to new cases. They also negotiated with the police, getting more cooperation from state troopers than local cops. The troopers agreed to release crime reports with the protected details removed.

At the Daily News , a longstanding pact with the police in which the newspaper deleted some crime details in return for a record of all police calls has collapsed, according to Managing Editor Patrick Dougherty.

Because local police were "unwilling to allocate resources" to edit out the protected details, they opted to simply withhold their files, Dougherty says.

Negotiations with police officials continue, but press lawyers are preparing to sue if they can't get access. At the Anchorage Times , Jenkins is adamant. "If it entails spending vast sums of money to stop this, well, that's what we'll have to do," he says. The Daily News is considering its options.

If the newspapers choose to go back to the legislature for relief, lobbying could be difficult. In effect, they'd be asking wary politicians to overturn legal protection for crime victims.

But going to court may not be much more promising. State laws exempt law enforcement files from public and press access. Pleading "common law right of access" can be a dicey proposition. And claiming a right of access under the First Amendment is the longest of long shots, at least with police files. The U.S. Supreme Court has assured some right of access to open court records but has never hinted that it would treat police records in the same way.

In order to use a legal challenge as a wedge to open up police records, lawyers for the press would have to show that the work police do is somehow advanced by having public disclosure of their files. The Supreme Court has insisted upon that kind of public service pre-mise before it will recognize a right of press access to government records. It does not consider the First Amendment to be a constitutional "freedom of information act." Police could be counted on to argue that public disclosure hinders, rather than helps, their work. A good many courts would find that argument persuasive, it seems clear.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press suggests that news organizations negotiate their way out of any impasse with the police. With no law to back up the press, however, the cops may have little incentive to offer anything. l