Appeals court rejects previous ruling in Sandy Springs police records suit

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled March 13 that a lower-court decision favoring the City of Sandy Springs in an Open Records lawsuit was premature.

The ruling is a setback for Sandy Springs and its practice of tailoring police reports released to the public to include nothing but the barest of data.

Responding to the ruling, Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul said the appellate court’s procedural determination does not affect the substantive part of the trial court decision.

“Council will discuss this matter and proceed in a manner that ensures public access to vital information while protecting the integrity of the investigative process,” Paul said.

Appen Media brought suit against the city May 2024, claiming it is violating the Open Records Act by denying the newspaper access to initial police officer narratives that are routinely filed during early stages of investigations.

After a Fulton County judge ruled in favor of the city last December, Appen appealed the decision to the higher state court. In its ruling, the Court of Appeals determined, “the trial court’s grant of summary judgment was premature. Genuine issues of material fact remain based on this record and thus the trial court erred by granting summary judgment to the City.”

The Georgia Open Records Act maintains that all public records are open for public inspection, but it does allow exceptions. The law provides some latitude for withholding materials surrounding ongoing police investigations. However, initial police crime and incident reports are required to be made available to the public.

For over a year, the paper has pushed Sandy Springs for more details about calls its police officers have been dispatched to investigate.

In most cases, the agency has returned the requests with one-sentence narratives stating when and where police were dispatched to and, usually, for what reason. Unlike incident reports provided by police agencies in surrounding jurisdictions, the Sandy Springs reports lack details on the nature of the crime, an accounting of property damage, injuries associated with a crime, whether any arrests were made, and whether any suspects have been identified.

Sandy Springs admits that officers responding to incidents generally write more detailed reports in a second document, often written the same day. The city claims in its legal defense that this second report is not part of the initial incident report, and therefore doesn’t have to be disclosed.

In its complaint, Appen cited examples of Sandy Springs reports where both documents were created at the same time on the same day. When the newspaper filed open records requests for the reports associated with these incidents, the city only provided the first, one-sentence page.

Appen noted in its complaint guidance from the Attorney General’s Office that, “A common-sense interpretation of ‘initial incident report’ is that anything written at the same time as the first part of the report is part of the initial incident report.”

In December, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Adams ruled in favor of the city, saying Appen Media failed to prove it is unlawful for the department to withhold the additional information.

Adams said Appen’s use of the Attorney General’s assessment is not the law, “although [Appen] may be correct in its assertion that [the Sandy Springs Police Department’s] practice violates the spirit of the Open Records Act.”

Appen appealed the decision to the state Court of Appeals. On March 13, the higher court rejected the lower court action.

The ruling says the city did not prove that the records should have been withheld in the first place.

“Here, it was the City’s burden to show why the requested records should not be disclosed as a matter of law,” the judgement states. “The City fails to meet its burden.”

The court also focused on the Georgia laws underpinning the case.

State open records laws read that “initial police arrest reports and initial incident reports,” are always subject to release, even if they are part of an ongoing investigation.

The appellate court’s decision points out that while, “the Act requires disclosure of ‘initial incident reports,’ it does not define that term.”

Even so, it argues that whether or not a document is an initial incident report must be weighed on a case-by-case basis, instead of the report’s title or when it was produced.

The Court of Appeals rejected the city’s blanket defense that only the first, brief report is always considered the initial document.

“Whether a narrative report prepared at the same time as an incident report actually constitutes part of that initial incident report is a fact specific inquiry,” the court wrote. “In some cases it may, and in some cases it may not.”

The appellate court’s ruling says it did not, nor did the lower trial court, have enough information to determine whether the documents in question should have been released.

During the lower court’s discovery process, Appen Media asked the city to submit the complete reports – both the brief account and the second account with more details – for the incidents.

Sandy Springs did not provide all of the materials.

Without these materials and the ability to compare the two, the appeals court says “the trial court’s grant of summary judgement was premature. Genuine issues of material fact remain based on this record and thus the trial court erred by granting summary judgment to the City.”

As a result of this decision, the case will go back to the lower court for reconsideration. Both parties also have the option to appeal to the state Supreme Court or reach a settlement.

Court of Appeals Presiding Judge Christopher McFadden filed a concurrent opinion in the decision, saying that the ruling should have gone a step further.

Citing the city’s actions for filing separate reports, McFadden wrote: “I would hold that this practice is an improper circumvention of the [Open Records] Act and that the responding officer’s full narrative about his or her initial response to the incident also constitutes an ‘initial incident report’ subject to disclosure under the Act.”

McFadden also addressed the lack of materials the city provided in the discovery process.

“The possibility that the more detailed narratives associated with Appen Media’s requests might also contain information that is exempt from disclosure merely highlights the existence of questions of fact as to whether the City disclosed what it was required to in response to Appen Media’s requests,” he wrote.

“The evidence, viewed most favorably to Appen Media, shows that Appen Media requested incident reports but received only the short reports and not any more detailed narratives. And there is evidence, by way of examples from closed cases, of instances when responding officers included one- or two-sentence narratives about an incident in a short report and the rest of that narrative in a more detailed narrative report.”

After describing an example in the court record, McFadden went on: “A factfinder could infer from the closed-case examples that similar, more detailed narratives exist for the incidents that are the subjects of Appen Media’s open records requests, but the City did not disclose them.”