Topher Sanders Transcript: June 2, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
During the June, 2025, widening the pipeline virtual training, we’ll focus on leveraging FOIAs data and communication tools for better reporting. That’s because in this age of artificial intelligence, data journalism and advanced communication tools, you don’t have to be part of an elite investigative reporting team to produce stories that have big impact. Journalists across a range of beats can dig deeper and employ creative strategies to find sources and communicate in ways that resonate. During this first session, we’ll hear from a veteran investigative journalist who’ll share tips on using FOIA to illuminate issues of injustice and inequity. Topher Sanders reports on racial injustice and inequality in the legal system for ProPublica among his many career highlights. In 2016, Topher co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that works to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color. Topher, thank you so much for joining the widening the Pipeline family today.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:01:16):
Thank you for having me.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01:18):
So I know you’ve prepared a presentation for us, so I will just turn things over to you.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:01:24):
Awesome. And I can share my screen and all that. I have that ability, yes. Okay, great. Alright, so I’m going to do that. How many do we have on?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01:35):
We have 15 so far. One person had a reporting assignment and may get a few others.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:01:41):
And so staffing and me. So it’s more like 12 right
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01:46):
At the moment? Yeah, maybe. Well, another one just joined. So 12 or 13.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:01:50):
Alright,
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:01:51):
Beautiful.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:01:52):
We’ll see. We’ll get going. So listen, the way I like to do this and even in a virtual space, I think it’s the best way to do it is that this is a conversation. These slides that are going to be up are just kind of prompts for us to have this conversation. If throughout, I’m droning on for 10 minutes at a time, then both of us are doing it wrong. You guys got to stop, ask questions. If you have insights or curiosities about anything, please stop. That’s really what will make this the most productive hour possible for everybody. So let me share my screen and let’s get going.
(00:02:34):
So public records. And so this is going to be us talking about strategies, insights, and some tools to think about how to pursue records and things that I’ve found have been helpful and successful for me. And this is not a trick question, but it’s the kind of start the way we want to finish, right? So I need someone in the group to just talk through what a public record is, not a trick question. So whoever had their coffee already and ready to chap in. So who wants to do that? And is there someone here that can pay attention to the hand raising and get those things identified?
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:03:15):
Yes. Topher, this is Sydney Clark and I can do that.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:03:17):
Thank you. All right. Alright, someone raise their hand before I call on somebody. Alright, we got one. Let’s go.
Monique Welch/formerly Houston Landing (00:03:27):
Hi Topher. I’m Monique Welch. I’m formerly with the Houston Landing. I would define a public record as just a document or database that is accessible to the public. Essentially the public can mean anyone who is seeking those records. Doesn’t always have to mean a family member or a friend or a journalist. It can be anyone who desires it for any reason that agency is not required to solicit.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:03:58):
Absolutely. That’s a dope definition. That’s it. A public record is again, no trick there. It’s a record that belongs to the public. Now, every state and in our federal government, they try to define and put some guardrails around what is and what isn’t a public record. And that’s where the journalists and the skill sets that we all learn over our careers help us know those carve outs. Know those boundaries can either flex against them, push against them, expand them sometimes, and then the legislators, the state houses will get together and try to restrict and then we have to get smarter on how to do this. But that’s it. It’s the document information, not confidential, generally pertain to conduct of the government, blah, blah, blah. What’s some examples of a public record? And let’s see if we can think a little bit outside the box here. So this is where since everyone’s so eager this morning, I’m going to put everybody’s name on my screen somewhere so I can just start calling cats. I love this. Who’s going to help me out here?
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (00:05:04):
Elisha, brown state’s newsroom. Emails. Emails are a good example of a public record.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:05:09):
I love it. It’s a great one. Who else? What else? Who else got something?
Leah Kincaid | WGXA News (00:05:16):
I can say something. Leah Kincaid W jx A News how much the mayor makes in a year. That’s a public record.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:05:25):
Yeah, salary records. All public record. I love that. I love that. And we’ll do one more.
Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (00:05:32):
Hi Keerti Gopal. I’m with Inside Climate News like city inventories or state inventories, data spreadsheets, things like that.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:05:43):
Love it. All correct. All right. Answers public records. So man, there’s so many dope public records. Yeah, birth records, death records, marriages, divorces, real estate, police records, of course, text messages, right? We forget that those text messages, particularly on devices that are owned controlled by the government, it’s a public record. And now where you have to fight mightily to get them, you might, but those are public records, particularly when they’re talking about the public’s business. Now, just a point of clarification. If someone’s on their government issue phone and they’re trying to organize a dental visit for their kid, is that a public record? Anybody? I am waiting for a response. If no one is clear on that,
Monique Welch/formerly Houston Landing (00:06:38):
I’d say yes.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:06:40):
The answer is no. No. So you can be on your government issued device. Even this applies to emails as well. And if you are handling what is clearly personal business outside the realm of your job or what you are there and paid by state or local dollars to do their, there are carve outs for those type of records. And I think justifiably so, I don’t know that it is on us to know exactly that your kid needs a filling done on Tuesday, that’s your business. You happen to get the email into your work email or you are texting with the dentist, the dentist’s office back, not public record. Now arguments can be made that if someone’s doing that, a hundred percent of their government issued time taking care of this personal business and then not doing the public’s business, you might get walk into court and try to make an argument to obtain those documents or at least some kind of summary of those records to show that hey, this person’s not doing their job. That’s why we want these records. So there are situational kind of arguments that could be made about some records, but generally speaking, those personal things, not public record even when done on a public device. Alright, so what they look like, I’m going to skip this part. I’m assuming this crew here, everybody submitted a public record or at least once, is that right? I’m not looking at everybody. Can’t see everybody. Let me see if there’s a way for me to see people.
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:08:14):
You’re spotlighted. So one second.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:08:16):
Okay. Alright, I’d like to look at all the beautiful faces and then call out on some names. That’s my vibe. So is everybody submitted public record? Is that I guess I have not actually, who hasn’t?
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:08:33):
Mark Edwards for Washington Examiner. I don’t,
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:08:36):
Haven’t either. Oh man. Well, we’re going to get y’all going. We’re going to get y’all going. So if you want to take this link down, this is just a sample of a FOIA at a jersey so you can kind of see what one looks like. And I can provide this link if you for some reason aren’t able to get this, you want to snapshot it, whatever. But this link will be provided somewhere else. But this is just a quick example of what they look like. And if you go to this org and a few others that I’ll highlight, they provide you the basic beta text that you need, that beta text that allows you just to fill in the substantive nature of the record you’re looking for in every state in the union. So if you need to request something out of Virginia or Hawaii or Massachusetts, you go to outfits like the reporters’ committee and they have sample letters on how to make requests in those states.
(00:09:28):
Really great resource. All right, so one of the things that can I think gets people in trouble a lot when they do a records request is not spending enough time upfront just thinking about the records you’re pursuing and are you asking the right question to yield the records you want? And this is an example where I failed to do this. I was given a tip that some corrections officers were getting sweetheart deals from the local DA and I kind of rushed in there and fired off a request I didn’t chew on. Hey, do I need to think a little bit longer about the nature of the records I’m requesting? Do I need to carve out a little bit more about the timeframe I want this? I just charged in fired off a request and naturally I didn’t get the records that I want. And this is just an email that I received from the sheriff’s office kind of telling me to kick rocks like yo, yeah, sure we can look and see about corrections officers and internal affairs, but to do that we’ll have to do a 10 year review for you. Do you want that? It’s going to cost a million dollars. So this is what can come to you if you don’t take the time upfront to think about the records you want. Okay, now this is where I am going to, is there a way for me to see people’s faces? Is there a way for me to change this?
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:10:54):
I’m seeing people on my end. Are you seeing people on the side?
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:10:59):
Don’t? That’s what I want to see. And this one you can
Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (00:11:01):
Go up to the top right corner and where it goes view you can change
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:11:05):
To gallery. You have to
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:11:05):
Change the view on your end. Yeah, you click on gallery, it should work.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:11:10):
Okay, gallery videos participants. Okay, see it took me out again. That’s my bad guys. Now I need to get back and okay, well I’m going to trust that someone’s going to jump in here and help me out here. So you’ve been told that an elected official has been not going to work for weeks or months. How can we prove that? And I am looking for responses.
Tamia Fowlkes/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (00:11:46):
You could request their emails for the last two or three months just to see if they’ve had any correspondence with employees within their department.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:11:55):
I like that. That’s great. I like the emails. I think that what you’ll get, and you probably will see a lot of email activity, but you could track to see what they’re sending out. Are they responding to emails? That is good. It’s going to be pretty labor intensive and someone could do that. I’ve been working from home and they still could do that with where I’m going to land on this, but this is where you’re really trying to see if someone’s been showing up at work. Who else?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:12:25):
If they sit on any councils or permissions, that’ll require a little bit of research. But you can ask for attendance records too or voting records.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:12:33):
I like the voting records. That’s dope. Absolutely. You could ask for that. That is a way to see if they’ve been going to those committees, showing up at their meetings. Love that. One more thought on how we could do this.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:12:45):
I mean I would start with their schedules. Can you hear me? Okay? I would start with just their schedules for the next three months out, if that’s how long they say they’re not going to work and find out who’s going to be there in their stead
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:12:58):
Or if they have been going to work. This is like the tip to you is that this cat’s been away from the gig.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:13:04):
Oh, I see. Yeah. Then what their schedules were and then we can get more specific there with those committee meetings and stuff like that as we kind of find out where they were and where they weren’t with that schedule ideally.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:13:13):
I like that. And I’m going to tell you I had to do this once and I’m going to tell you what I did. And this is something again to kind of broaden the way you think about what a public records is, is I requested the access badge information. How often was this individual swiping their badge to get in and out of the building that is their work office. What I’ve been told, it’ll come up again a little later, is that this elected official, his wife in the state of Florida public defenders are elected officials. There’s 20 of them in the state of Florida.
(00:13:52):
They are constitutional officers, which in a state when you’re a constitutional officer, it means that all your rights and the power bestowed to you is not local, but it’s built into the constitution of that state. So you are a state officer, so there’s 20, those are pretty important positions. This gentleman’s wife had learned that he may not have been altogether faithful. So the wife showed up at work and proceeded to try to fire people at the job. And she doesn’t work at the office, she’s not the elected official, she’s a spouse, so she doesn’t have the power to fire or hire anyone. So she showed up, created a fuss, she threw some things, tried to fire some people, and so to prepare his marriage, he wasn’t coming to work, he was staying at the crib trying to figure his life out. And I was able to nail this, got a few people to talk to me about this, but where it really started to hit the fan was where I had been told the wife had an access badge and that hey, she’s been coming into the office all the time, she wants to.
(00:15:08):
And then this turned into a really big thing where I found them deleting the access badge information and it turned into a grand jury and the whole thing. And this is me using the access badge data to show that my man had only swiped it three days and a month period and another day and another month. And so clearly he wasn’t going to work, he was trying to fix his life. And that’s the way you can do that. And that’s kind of thinking outside the box on how to go at records. Okay, next one. Again, looking for responses. You’ve been told that or you’ve observed with your own eyes, you’re walking around your community and you’re looking at your police force and man, they looking kind of unhealthy. They looking like they couldn’t run down a suspect to save their life, right? Is there a way to prove that you have a completely out of shape, an overweight police force? And I have this a JC story up. This is a story that I’m stealing from the A JC love this story. And so that’s why I have this up here. How would one go about trying to prove that?
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:16:21):
I guess you could request access to the records. They do fitness tests, you’re going to request access to those records,
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:16:27):
Man, that is straight down the middle. Love that. And yes, you’ll request that and it will be denied. Anyone know why? It’ll be denied
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:16:37):
Hipaa,
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:16:38):
Correct? It’ll be denied via hipaa. It’ll be a HIPAA violation for them to provide that fitness test result. Anybody else?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:16:49):
So AJC is actually my market, but one way we also got around this was asking how many, because we’ve had post officer proceedings and that their criteria, so we asked how many officers within an agency have completed a fitness test or have at least been certified in that arena. So it wasn’t specific to individuals, but the agency as a whole were able to get those records.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:17:16):
That is a really smart way to do that. And is because you’re getting in bulk data largely that shouldn’t be something that should be denied. I think that they may try to come up with creative sistance to try to deny, but I believe that they should all fail problems there if they do try to deny it and then you try to push back and you could find yourself in court or something like that because they’re going to stick to their guns maybe. But I love that. That’s a great way to do it. That is not how the A JC did it. They had another kind of outside the box approach. Anybody got to give someone else another stab at away. This particular agency, this particular newspaper was able to do this.
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:17:58):
I don’t know if there’d be records of foot chases that the police may experience in their day to day
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:18:03):
Love that there actually are records of that kind of labor intensive to get them, because in each agency they’ll have a signal designation for someone on foot fleeing and whatever that signal code is in your agency, if you go into their CAD system, their computerized dispatch, you should be able to request that. It just means they’ll have to do a filter on it and search for it. But I like that. I think that is a smart way to try to get at mainly large. How often are they even running after suspects in general, right? That could be an interesting and good story to do in a local market, but that is not what a JC did. I’ll tell you what they did. And this is just again, thinking and trying to be creative about how to pursue their records. They went and got all of the uniform dimension purchase orders made by the Atlanta or was it Atlanta pd? I think it was the Atlanta PD or Decatur Police Department. And they were able to use those dimensions, those uniform order purchases and the dimensions to approximate height and size of all these individuals. And it was a really fantastic story well done and went across the department that they were able to show that this police department needs a membership at Gold’s Gym.
(00:19:29):
And so it was a good story, but that’s the way they did it. Thinking outside of the box, be creative. This is just another way of thinking about creativity. One thing that I find a lot of journalists when they hit walls around records is believing that they can get the record only from one place. They’re like, oh, I’m interested in some FBI records so that only the FBI has them. I’m interested in these school records, so only my local school district has Nah. So you have to think about where else do these records, what other agencies and offices touch these records? They too are custodians of the record and often the benefit of going to someone that is not the target of your investigation. And that’s how I think about everything in the scheme and scope of an investigation is because they don’t give a flee about giving you the records. So here’s a quick example of that. Anybody know who this pleasant looking woman is?
(00:20:37):
Nope. Mike, this is a little before your time. This is Angela Corey, she’s a former DA in the state of Florida. If her name tickles something in the back of your memory is because she was the prosecutor who screwed up the Trayvon Martin case. She had the Trayvon Martin case fumbled it completely, didn’t get any justice at the same time that she was, was supposed to be prosecuting George Zimmerman and allowed him to utilize Stand Your Ground in our own community in Jacksonville. She was from Jacksonville. She was prosecuting a woman named Marissa Alexander and was going to put her in jail for 60 years for firing a warning shot at her husband who was beating her routinely. And so she’s a pleasant lady. And when the state and the governor of Florida was trying to figure out who’s going to take the Trayvon Martin case, it was the international cluster, fuck who’s going to take this case?
(00:21:42):
He selected this woman in the city of Jacksonville where black folks knew who she was and what she was about. They were aghast that she had been selected to take this case. So I had been told that this woman tried to skirt state rules to give her office bonuses. And I knew that if I went to the front door of her office and said, yo, give me these records, she was going to stonewall, outright, deny or come up with ways that we wouldn’t get records. We once asked her for minutes to a meeting, which there’s completely no justification for withholding minutes to a meeting and she kept those away from our newspaper for three months just because she hated the newspaper and hated its reporting. So to get this bonus thing, I knew I wasn’t going to get it from her. So I went to this outfit, it’s called the Justice Administrative Commission.
(00:22:34):
It’s a weird little office in the state of Florida, but their whole job is to be the HR agency for state’s attorneys, district attorneys and public defenders so that they don’t have to staff those people up in their own offices. There’s a state office that does all that work. Instead of going to Angela Corey’s office and saying, Hey, yo, I need to get those bonus, that bonus information that I heard you illegally did. Of course she’s not going to give that to me. So I went here and I said, Hey, I need to get the salary information for every employee in the fourth Circuit. Can you do that for me? And they’re like, you’re creating a headache for us. We know why you’re doing this. And of course the answer, Lako is going to call us our office, but no dog in the fight for us.
(00:23:22):
Here you go. Gave it to me in like three days. And the way she had done this, and she kind of hid it this way, was she gave everyone a salary bump one month and then reduce the salary back to their original salary the next month. So if you said, Hey, give me the bonuses, they could in a legal but not honest way, say we didn’t give no bonuses, bro, but they did. They changed everybody’s salary for a month and then reduced it. The very next month, I was able to prove that I got all the records from them and I was able to write the story that they had given out $425,000 in bonuses. And then because this is my beef with this whole headline, I was incredibly confident like though we had this, we went to experts, dah, dah, dah. We had her solid that she had broken the law, but my paper didn’t have the balls, the cahones to go hard with the headline and just say what it was.
(00:24:23):
So that’s why you have this mealy mouth headline here and just to show you how they’re not your friend, I asked her, Hey, yo, are you going to do this again? And this is her response said, I don’t know, but I don’t know if that would be something I would be end up discussing with you Topher. I just love that, love that energy walking while black big story I did for ProPublica in this story we were targeting a particular police agency, but again, knowing that they may play games with us on the records, we went to the state and got 7 million records from the state in a week it was done and we had the data that we needed to nail this story that went kind of crazy on the web and change some laws and all that stuff. So think about where else the records sit and where you can get them. At this point I want to stop and ask are there any questions? I hope there are some questions and I can’t see anybody. So if you’re raising your hand, I don’t know. And I hope that someone else is looking to see if you are.
Monique Welch/formerly Houston Landing (00:25:34):
I don’t know if you can see my hand raised, but I had a question.
Monique Welch/formerly Houston Landing (00:25:58):
Yeah, my question was about, I’m blanking on the name of the agency or the acronym, but I think it was the Justice Action Committee. You said that was based in Florida. Is that an agency that is just a Florida thing or does every state kind of have something like that, that it’s almost like the middleman essentially between some agencies for records?
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:26:18):
Great question. The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know if other states have this exact agency, but do other states have similar little agencies like this? Absolutely. This is where using your sourcing, and I’ll tell you, I wasn’t that I was just incredibly smart or something and I knew where to go to find this agency. It was that I used my sources say, yo, I know this story is out there about Angela Corey and her bonuses, she’s not going to give it to us. And I went to my sources, how am I going to get that? And they were like, I even built a relationship. This is where the relationships matter. I had built a relationship, a strong one with another state’s attorney in the state of Florida, well actually several other. And I leaned in, I said, yo, my guy, I’m working on this story.
(00:27:08):
I heard this about Angela Corey and he’s her peer, he got the same rank as her, he just in a different part of Florida. And I said, how can I get that? He’s said, oh, I heard about the bonuses, I heard she did that. That’s crazy. You know where you need to go? You need to go to the Justice Administrative Commission. And that’s how I learned it. So all that to say is that in every state there are going to be these little quirky offices that do things that touch paper that performing their mission in government and they’re going to be similar to this one if not exactly like it. And you just have to lean into your sourcing to try to find out where those little bitty agencies are and how you can use the records laws to get information out of them. That was a great question. Who else? Go ahead Alicia. Go ahead.
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (00:28:00):
Hi. So for walking while Black, you said you went to Florida state officials, gave you 7 million documents, basically. How did you decide to whittle it down and how long did it take you to go through all those documents you and your
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:28:18):
Colleagues while you were doing that? It was 20 million records. We ended up needing seven of them for what we were doing. So 20 million records is a spreadsheet, so it’s not like actual paper records, it was the spreadsheet which are a reflection of the paper records. And so those 20 million records came through as a spreadsheet and if you’ve ever had to get records that large, they have to do an FTP, they have to do a big file transfer. So it took four days for us to download the entire data set. It was actually quite simple. It was there in the state of Florida. And for just so you guys know, every state has a centralized traffic citation office. They have a centralized office in every state that handles the state’s traffic citations from all over. I believe those offices mainly exist for insurance purposes. Quite frankly, believe that’s why those offices exist.
(00:29:25):
But in every state there is an office, they’ll have a different name in every state, but just know that if you’re ever interested in big traffic data, go to the state, ask some questions, you’ll find the office and you’ll be able to get those records pretty easily. And so I made the request to this office, I think in the state of Florida, was the comptroller’s office, Florida comptroller’s office and made the request it was about 400 bucks, which again is a complete bargain for 20 million records and got ’em in about a week or so after they had to establish the FTP transfer and all that. So that’s how that went. Did that answer your question? I’m sorry.
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (00:30:12):
Partially how long did it take you to go through the seven? Well, you said you needed the 7 million records, but beyond getting those records, which was the crux of obviously this longer big huge piece that did really well, how long was the reporting process?
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:30:29):
We reported walking wall black, kind of enlightening speed for a project of its size. We souped to nuts six months I think we started reporting in April and started publishing in August thereabout and then published nine or so pieces between August and January weary. So about some total 10 months, nine months of reporting and writing and publishing for this particular piece. And again, that’s for Publica, that’s about as for the size of this project is about as fast. We did a lot of satellite stuff with this project. We used all that data to come up with some really nifty, we did games, we created some games for public to try to participate to kind of learn, do you know where it’s legal to cross the street or not? And most people don’t know where it’s legal and illegal to cross the street. And so it was a well executed and very, very fast project for its size. So nine months I think total mean. And then the next year, the thing I did a year ago was a two year project looking at railroads and it was a total year of reporting and then another year of writing and publishing. So bigger projects can definitely take a while.
Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (00:32:02):
Got it. Thanks Chafer.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:32:04):
No problem. Any other quick questions Sydney?
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:32:08):
I don’t see any zoom hands at the moment.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:32:10):
Alright, great. And where are we at on time? Where are we doing? Oh, okay, we’ll go quick and then at the end, know the law, it goes without saying you have to spend a little time digging into the statute language as stilted and as boring and as unreadable as that statute language is, it will be the thing that you will utilize to combat any kind of feisty agencies that want to fight you on your public records. So you have to spend some time looking at those statutes and seeing how they relate. And hopefully in your state there is a records ombudsman. I know that in most of the states that I pursue records, there is some kind of records ombudsman. They tend to be attached to the attorney general’s office. If you’ve not interacted or you’re not on their relationship list, it’s something to do.
(00:33:07):
You could do this tomorrow. You could call and introduce yourself, say, Hey, I just learned that your office kind of exists. I just want to call introduce myself. I’m a reporter at so-and-so. I may occasionally come to you with questions and stuff. And they’re good people to know. That’s who I go to when I have questions about whether or not a denial is legal or not, just another place. Sometimes they’ll tell you that a denial is legal and if you have other people on your squad, if you’ve got lawyers, it was your media organization, they may say, no, we don’t think that’s true and you end up in a fight for the records, but they can be good folks to talk to, make them prove it with the records. This is just kind of an attitude that I think when the reporters that I really admire tend to have this attitude, I try to be like this as a reporter, I developed a decent reputation of being that kind of reporter where the difference I saw between reporters that were nailing amazing stories and then transitioning on to amazing gigs at the times and the posts and all that, where they just had this attitude that they didn’t take the word of anyone, they made everyone prove it with the records.
(00:34:24):
And when you develop that kind of attitude, you’ll be surprised the kind of little sneaky things you’ll find agencies trying to do. So I’m sitting around, I’m going to age myself here, but just quickly example of proving it with the records and I’m watching the public information officer for the local school system. She had just gotten an iPad and iPads were newish around this time. So she’s got an iPad and I looked at her tablet when she had it and the first thing she said to me was, Topher, I bought it with my own money. I know you’re going to ask, but no, I bought it with my own money. I was like, all right, bet. Cool, that’s great. You like it, it’s cool, da. We chatted up a bit. Two weeks later I’m in that same spokesperson’s office, we’re chopping it up, IT guy comes in and he’s setting up iPad number two.
(00:35:17):
And I looked at the IT guy, I looked at the spokesperson and she goes to, I don’t know anything about it. I’m looking at it just like you. I don’t know what’s going on. I have my own personal iPad. I was like, okay, bet. Well, how many iPads is my man setting up? She’s like, I don’t know, I have no idea. I’ll go find out. So she walks out the office, she comes back, she’s like for the administrative staff, therefore HQ administrative staff. So for Jacksonville schools, that’s something like maybe 20 plus iPads. I was like, all right, cool. And she said, I know what you’re going to do, Topher. Oh, what am I going to do? You’re going to submit a records request. Absolutely I am. And so I walked out of there, got in the car driving back to the office before I got to the office, old girl hit me on the phone, was like, when you get to the office, call me.
(00:36:09):
It’s going to be me and the superintendent. We need to explain some things to you about these iPads. So yeah, they had bought $261,000 in iPads, right? And if you are going to take the word of the person when they tell you, then you’re going to miss this story. You got to make ’em prove it with the records. When I wrote this up, when I was going to pursue this story, my man knew I was headed with it and he said, you know what? They had bought iPads for every principal and vice principal in the entire district. And he took all those iPads and moved it to programmatic stuff for the kids. He knew that headline wasn’t going to fly and he was a new superintendent. So that’s making prove it with the records kind of energy and attitude that you want to kind of develop.
(00:36:59):
Alright, Sydney, any questions coming Popping up? No. Alright, cool. Track your records request. You want to use I FOIA or FOIA machine. Again, you guys can take a screenshot of this or whatever, but this whole little deck will be available and you want to come up with a way to track your records request. If you’re working a beat, you’re at a local spot. All of these agencies know you’re very busy. You’re pumping out story after story after story, particularly at the local level. And they’re banking on the fact that you’re just going to forget about this records request that you submitted. So you got to come up with whatever system works for you. I know Kat to use post-it notes, to track it and just whatever your system is, come up with it so that you can come back to them and routine basis based on the state that you’re pursuing the records, knowing whatever the retention laws are, whatever the confirmation deadlines are, how quickly they’re supposed to tell you that they have the records request, how quickly they’re supposed to get you the records. Knowing all those particulars in that state, use some system that helps you track that and then make follow-ups because those follow-ups are the thing that are going to drive your ability to actually obtain those records.
(00:38:15):
You’ve got to be a pest. You can’t be afraid to ask about your records request over and over again until the agency realizes you’re not going away and you want those records. And this is just a quick example. I pursuant some records for six, seven months at a local level. That’s ridiculous. Just so anyone knows that the local level should not take that long to get any records. And I just kept asking, kept asking, kept asking ultimately because the sheriff’s office knew I wasn’t going away, they just flat out came out and said, we don’t got ’em. We don’t got ’em. To our bad. We’ve been deleting them and it was a bad story for them. But I’m going to tell you again how I think the records I was pursuing was about them keeping an individual in jail for two years when they knew the gentleman was innocent after three months.
(00:39:11):
And what I was pursuing were the records, the conversation the lead detective was having with his other colleagues about that gentleman still being in jail. And I believe those emails were so damning that they ate this shit burger instead of the one I was trying to serve him. That’s how I think. I don’t believe this is true. I believe this is fake. They just lied and said we don’t have the records because if they give me the records of my man bitching about why is this dude in jail, it increases their liability, their culpability and the fact that they’re just some snakes keeping a black man in jail. So anyway, that utilize your sources, you have to, we are tracking. We got 13, 17 minutes left. Any questions popping up, Sidney?
Sydney Clark/NPF (00:40:01):
No
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:40:02):
Thank you. Use your sources. I straight up read my records requests to my sources. That’s what I mean. My sources, the kind of work I do where I’m shining light in the dark places pretty much all the time is what I do. My sources are the ones that know exactly and yours as well. They know exactly where the records are. They know exactly what you need to get those records. They know the computer it’s on. They know the file name of the record, they know that it’s held in this folder. I mean they know all of that. The more specificity you can use to pursue your records, it vastly increases your opportunity to get them. So in this instance, this is about, this turned into a PHA for a sitting congressman out of Florida. At the time he was the sheriff at Jacksonville, but now he’s in Congress, his name’s Rutherford.
(00:41:01):
And so I had heard that this dude Rutherford voided the tickets for a young on air traffic reporter for a local news station. Doesn’t get any better than this man. She’s the on air traffic reporter. She’s not bad on the eyes and all this. And she got her tickets voided by the sheriff. How did that happen? What happened was she got some tickets from a guy that had been tracking her flying to work. So she’s a track purpose person and she’s hauling ass every morning going into work and she’s passing this one cop every time and he’s clocking her and he’s stopping her. And then at some point it started getting creepy for her because I think he stopped her like three or four times. Some of the violations, a little iffy, like five miles over six miles over. And then on the fourth time he stopped her, he hit her with a bunch of tickets and so she promptly called the sheriff, said, man, your man was wigging me out and he gave me all these tickets and avoided it.
(00:42:03):
The sheriff voided the tickets. It turned into a huge, huge deal for my man. He had to deal with this the whole time he was running for office and I was able to nail this thing down utilizing the source. I was able to say it was an email. I was able to request the email. I said I knew the date, I knew the two, I knew who it went to, I knew who it came from. I knew all of that because the source gave it to me. And the minute I dropped this, the sheriff’s office called me after I talked to Rutherford because of course it’s not like a surprise or nothing. He knew it was coming, but he calls up and he goes, man, I didn’t ask you. So how’d about that email? I was like, man, what you talking about? You asking me to tell man?
(00:42:46):
Kick rocks my guy. And so he was really hurt about this and he wanted to know what my source was. But that happens sometimes. Anyway, so the same thing happened here. This was our Pulitzer Prize finalist stuff here for public service. One of the pieces in that package was this. And it was at the time when Trump’s first administration was separating all these kids at that time they were saying, oh, it’s daycare and it’s a summer camp and no, the kids are so happy and all of this. And so we went hard and did some really, really profound records request stuff for this entire package. And in one instance, I was able to get a PIO to give me just enough hint so I can nail this story and find one particular worker who was accused of molesting eight children. And this of course, as you might imagine, went pretty gangbusters when it dropped emails, goes without question, got to pursue so, so powerful. I cannot stress it no matter what age we’re in these officials. Forget that these emails are public records. I want to ask again about questions. Now we’re starting to do it wrong.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:44:07):
Let me jump into over, because I’m fascinated by this as I often tell people I wish sometimes I was back in the newsroom reporting myself when I hear from speakers like you because you provide me with such insight. But I do see that Kirti in the comments said something about careful with pinpoint for high risk Secure. Tell us a little bit what you meant by that.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:44:34):
Yeah.
Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (00:44:36):
Oh, that was about Google pinpoint. My newsroom got a security training where they warned us that because Pinpoint is where you would upload a ton of files that you got from the me record request and then it’s an easier way to search through ’em. And we were told that it’s not necessarily secure if you’re working with records that you’re potentially worried about legal issues or subpoenas and those kinds of questions. That was just the advice that we received. But I don’t know if Topher has insight on that.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:45:13):
We operate under the same rules at ProPublica. We utilize Pinpoint for anything that is public and open facing. So for instance, court records which anyone can go get, we throw those into Pinpoint like No tomorrow, but I’m working on some stuff now that I’m trying to get some people to give up some otherwise not public inspector general reports and audits. And those will not go into pinpoint anything that would blow a source or anything that you otherwise don’t want someone else to see. Don’t put it in pinpoint if you’re cool. Otherwise with people having some visibility, assuming that there’s visibility on it, then you can use Pinpoint for it. Pinpoint is a very powerful tool to use. I used it on my two year railroad project and it was great, but it was all court records that anybody could look at and see. There was nothing secret about any of it. I did get some secret material in the course of our reporting and I did not put that into pinpoint. You want to find other ways to digitally go through those records if you want to go through those records digitally. So yeah, that’s a good point.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:46:25):
Fer, I have a question and that is based on the atmosphere we’re in right now, the sort of sense of uncertainty and fear of recrimination and everything that’s going on in the country, are you seeing a different atmosphere in terms of having to maybe put more effort into getting the FOIAs processed or responded to? Or are you worried about a point coming up soon where people just shut it down completely?
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:47:01):
Yeah, so I would say that if you didn’t get your government any DC oriented records before January, good luck. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. And I’m saying that knowing that Democratic administrations are absolutely, this is to burst some bubbles. Democratic administrations are no friends to reporters really pursuing records just aren’t just based on the track record. We’ve looked at the data, I thought there’s an outfit out there that tracks this stuff and they put out a report every year. They’re no great friend to us. They are probably not as guarded as Republican administrations. But I just want to blow the narrative that though they’re great and they’re perfect for us. No they’re not. Obama actually had a horrible, horrible track record for giving up records during his tenure.
(00:47:55):
But yes, the new administration is a different animal and I don’t know what you’re going to get at the federal level for that. That being said, I have not run into big issues at the state level, Republican led or democratic led. I think at the state level, what you’re going to find state and local level are people really just trying to do their jobs. And I do think what you’re speaking to is a little bit of how some officials are emboldened to be jerks in a way because of what they see coming out of dc, the energy they see coming out of dc. But by and large, when it comes to trying to get traffic data or get police reports, me and me and my colleagues, my peers are doing this work. So far we’ve seen people doing business as usual out in these streets, particularly at the local level, which is where I get the bulk of my records, all the great stories I’ve done, very few of them are even the stuff that we did about child separation, that’s a federal issue. But we went fool with them to get the records. We went to the states, we went to the cities and the communities to get the records where we knew we could get ’em.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:49:15):
I think we have time for three more questions. So we’ll start with Gabby, then Tamia and then Lionel.
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:49:22):
Hi Topher. I’m Gabriela Nunez with WXIA Channel 11 in Atlanta, Georgia. So I have a more specific question. I’m a special project producer and one of the series that I do is called More Than a Number where we’ve try to transform crime reporting and really humanize those lives that have been lost, whether it’s through traffic crash or in a lot of times homicides or murders. So I do cover a lot of cold cases, but where I struggle is that a lot of law enforcement agencies tied behind. This is an open and active investigation when I just try to get something as simple as a police report or 9 1 1 calls. And a lot of the times we let people write in to say my loved one didn’t get any media attention or Hey, we’ve been waiting on this. Law enforcement doesn’t call it a cold case, but it’s been 20 years and then it’s a small agency, but because it was a homicide in a small sheriff’s office in rural Georgia, didn’t have the manpower at the time. That case is under the GBI. So I struggled to be creative with records to just get a simple incident report. I can get death records, marriage records where they’ve been buried. But what is your advice to make sure I get details of the case or try to know as much as law enforcement?
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:50:33):
Yeah. On the incident reports, are the families able to obtain those?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:50:38):
No. A lot of the times it’s actually pretty tragic at how many family members have nothing from law enforcement themselves.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:50:46):
But what I’m asking is have you worked with a family to make their own requests of those incident reports?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:50:51):
Yes. And the family will get, it’s an open and active investigation. And even though if we try to use kinship as a reason, it has not worked out, especially with Duke, GBI.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:51:02):
Does Georgia have a records ombudsman?
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:51:06):
I’m not sure I actually made note of that to look into that because I don’t know if that’s something to bring up as a fight with our largest law enforcement agency in the state.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:51:16):
And the other thing that what I kind of do here is I also lean in on the criminal, not defense, but sometimes defense. I make calls to my lawyer homies in instances like this and say, Hey man, I know you had that one case a couple months ago. Were you able to get the incident report out of that case? Anyone who’s taken a high profile cops killed person case in Georgia where we’re talking to Maud Arbery or any of those folks, I’d be asking them, what did y’all do to get the incident report? I need some assistance, some advice. I would lean into those folks to get some insights on how to do that. It’s a great question and I don’t have a magic thought on how to bust open the active investigation thing. It is the bane, I think of every reporter’s existence that this does this kind of work. So it’s a great question, but when I have had any success, it’s because I took the advice of some lawyers that I knew or the ombudsman was able to point to some arcane case that dealt with this that was in the zeitgeist and say, Hey, oh, cite this in your pushback. And I was able to do some of that.
Gabriella Nuñez | NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (00:52:31):
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Tamia Fowlkes/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (00:52:35):
Hi Topher. My name is Tamia Fowlkes, I’m a public investigator for the EY Journal Sentinel. I was wondering how often if you are in a situation where you’ve been maybe waiting months or pushing close to a year for records, when you would maybe write about that situation. If there’s ever scenarios in which you write about how long it takes an agency to respond to those types of requests in terms of seeking accountability, or do you think that it’s better to maybe wait and then pester them via email? I just feel like in my newsroom, we’ve run into that quite a bit and we do try to maybe seek accountability in those situations as well
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:53:11):
At the local level. I like those kind of stories. I don’t know how much they push the needle with the agencies to ultimately create the kind of public interest in the thing that yields the records being released. I have seen it happen a few times where writing about the records unlogged the records. More often than not, it’s just a story about you’re not getting your records. And what editors have told me over and over again is that, and this is at the local level, not at the ProPublica level, but at the local level, they go, oh, nobody wants to read that. You can’t get your records Topher. Nobody wants to read that. It’s like, yeah, but this is about the public good and I make all the arguments and errors when their story is big enough my newspapers have been down for and we do it.
(00:54:02):
And that combined with some editorial pressure. Now this again is dated about seven years. I think editorial pressure even as a concept is vastly different in a post-Trump world because people of now shame is not as powerful as it once was, unfortunately. So, but all this to say, it’s been far and in between that we write about a record struggle only when the story is big enough that it is captivated a bulk of the community and the lack of records around it is a thing. Has a newspaper really been down for that? And they’ve also used their editorial staff to kind of buttress and support that. That’s been my experience. And so at ProPublica, we don’t write about our pursuit of records. We just don’t.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:55:04):
Thank you. Final question to Lionel.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:55:07):
Yeah, thanks Topher for doing this. So I cover state government for Oklahoma. I’m based in Oklahoma City Public Radio Station, KOSU. I’m working on a story right now about basically the state of immigration enforcement in Oklahoma. And without getting into the weeds, there’s kind of these two tiers of it, right? Where the state has this law and permissible occupation that is a state crime for being in the country without permission. And then we have 2 87 G agreements and kind of jail enforcement models and task force models that is more streamlined through the feds. Well, I know that regardless of as to what or what the reason is that someone gets arrested for immigration purposes, whether it’s a state or federal level, that they get booked into a county jail and then they get transferred to a federal detainment center somewhere nearby, either in Oklahoma or in Texas usually. And along the process people are flagged with an ice hold. And I’m having this, I’m in this weird situation where I’ve sent a records request for the number of people that have been flagged with ice holds that have been arrested for state crimes and then transferred to federal custody at these county level sheriff’s offices and jail trusts.
(00:56:25):
And some of ’em are like, we don’t keep that record once we send ’em to the feds. They have all the records for that. And some of them are like, oh, it’s going to take us a while to get all that. And so now I’m getting two different responses from the same level of entity for the same records, for the same requests. And I’m not sure what to do with that situation and kind of who to press, I guess to be truthful is really Well, I can come up with,
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:56:52):
So
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:56:53):
I just wondered what you thought.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:56:54):
This goes to the question that Rachel asked a little bit, Rachel. This is where you will see this. It is a Republican LED state, right? I think I was just doing some where you have real allegiances to Trump’s sphere. You may encounter this kind of vibe and every state’s a little different. Even red states that are red states might not behave like this, but if they are super Trump supporter state, then you might find this a little bit. I was going to ask, are you asking for the carve out with those two filters in mind? You’ve already said they need to be iced, they need to be this. Have you asked for it more generally? And
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:57:41):
That’s kind of a concern that I had is that maybe I went too specific and that they were, because one of the responses that I got from Tulsa was that they don’t have to create new records to fulfill my request. Correct. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the jail roster with all the information that I want. I just can’t filter it.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:57:56):
So
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:57:57):
If they just gave me the roster with just the ice holds, it would be good.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:58:00):
I wonder if they could just send you the entire roster and
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:58:04):
Filter it myself.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:58:06):
And so two things that I would do. One, have you talked to or gotten any insight on what their, I think it’s called a master data. It’s basically it’s a document that will tell you all fields that they keep.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:58:21):
I know, I know what you’re talking about. And I have not thought about asking them. Okay,
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:58:24):
Get that so you can see all the fields they have already in the dataset and then know the fields and just say, man, give me the whole shit and Oodle give it all to me with these five fields. They don’t have to do no filtering. They don’t got to do no carve out. They don’t got to do no special design for you. They’re just giving you the shit and then you do your own stuff. And that’s what I would do. You want to find, there’s a field that’s going to address this ice hole thing, whatever field that is, you want that field in it, but tell them, don’t touch it. Just give me the whole thing, man. And so you’re going to get a lot of cats that aren’t who you’re interested in, but then you should be able to get and do your own pivots and stuff to determine who you’re looking
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (00:59:08):
For. And so just to be clear, there should be a document that they hold for themselves, for their own reference. This is what this means and that’s what we’re
Topher Sanders ProPublica (00:59:17):
Asking. Another thing I’ll be doing if you got any that were in the system a year ago, two years ago that would know some of this, once you get into the back chance with the data cats, they always in a dungeon somewhere at these agencies, they looking for someone to give them a piece of bread and some water. You just need to become friendly with some of these cats and they’ll tell you exactly the data they have. And I take cats out for coffee and say, man, talk me through your data system so I know what it looks like. Sometimes they’re going to make games, play games and say, oh, it was built for us and it is archaic and we don’t really know how to work it that well. Oh cool. Give me the make and model, I’ll help you out.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (01:00:02):
Okay. Yeah. We get a lot more of the bigheaded leadership type thing where folks aren’t sure if they’re, they feel weird about just releasing whatever data set it is and so they’re like, let me just ask leadership. And then leadership’s like, oh no, we don’t have this. We don’t keep this, we don’t go fuck off.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (01:00:17):
Yeah, skip all that by trying to get the information on the back end and coming back with a really well-informed records request that doesn’t allow them to play some of these games. But I think you asked for the level of specificity in your ask, allow them to say, nah dog, we good. So I think if you back out a bit and get a bigger bucket that you then go in and find what you want. Maybe you could have some success.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:00:42):
Thank you. Yes, has been an incredibly powerful discussion. You put us all on game, as they say, as the young people say today. And so I want to take this opportunity to thank you for joining us today and I’m sure the journalists will want to reach out to you.
Topher Sanders ProPublica (01:00:58):
Yeah, please do. I mean, I’m saying it, I know cats say this kind of stuff all the time, like, yo, holler back at me and all that. I’m dropping my email right here. Hit me up if you got questions or you want to talk offline about something you’re dealing with records wise or whatever, holler at me,
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:01:19):
Topher Sanders of public. I thank you so much and we’ll be in touch. Take
Topher Sanders ProPublica (01:01:24):
Care.
Lionel Ramos/KOSU (01:01:24):
Alright, take care. Thank you, Topher.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:01:26):
Bye-Bye.
###
