Mitch Perry
Clearwater GOP Sen. Jack Latvala‘s expansive and controversial bill that would exempt the employment history of police officers exempt from public records disclosure sailed through the Senate Criminal Justice Committee Monday.
Latvia said he realized the need for the legislation after a Clearwater man was able to unearth information about a Clearwater police officer by requesting the officer’s employment application, which 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,” Latvala said.
SB 1324 would cloak law enforcement officer’s residential addresses, including former residences, and residences where the officer frequently lives other than their 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.
That’s not all.
It also would shield home addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, photographs, dates of birth, and places of employments of parents, siblings and co-habitants of all of the 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 said.
He did also offered an amendment to remove 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 Monday 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 cleared the committee, and continues on to the full Senate.
