Clearwater GOP state Sen. Jack Latvala’s expansive and controversial bill that would exempt the employment history of police officers from public records disclosure sailed through the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this afternoon.
Latvia said the legislation is needed after he learned that a Clearwater man who requested an employment application of a Clearwater police officer was able to unearth information about the officer that hadn’t been redacted.
“It brought to mind that there are some other pieces of information that could be used to track down the location of either a police officer, a law enforcement official, or their close family members,” the senator said.
The bill would make secret the residential addresses, including former residencies, and residencies in which the person frequently resides other than the person’s home address. It would also shield email addresses, drivers license numbers, license plate numbers, and banking and financial information of current or former public defenders, assistant public defenders as well as law enforcement officers.
But that’s not all.
It would also shield the home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, photographs, dates of birth and places of employments of the parents, siblings and co-habitants of all of the above mentioned public officials.
“In other words, we want to be able to keep folks who might want to cause harm to these law enforcement people from being able to get to their loved ones as well,” Latvala added.
The senator did offer an amendment that removes language that would have allowed former places of employment to be shielded from the public.
The legislation is strongly opposed by the First Amendment Foundation. The organization’s president, Barbara Petersen, has told the Tampa Bay Times that the exemptions “effectively eliminate oversight and accountability for these personnel by taking their entire history out of public view.”
A website called Photography Is Not A Crime wrote today that the bill “not only would prevent citizens, including journalists and attorneys from accessing the employment history of police officers, it would prevent police chiefs from doing so as well in the event that they would prefer a cop who isn’t a liability for their agency.”
The bill passed the committee, and continues on now to the full Senate.
