Balancing safety, openness

U.S. District Judge George C. Smith, who sits in Columbus, made a courageous ruling last week in the interest of maintaining an open society.
Judge Smith ruled that a city can't refuse to release information from a police officer's personnel file unless it can be shown that releasing the information would pose a & quot;very real threat & quot; to the officers or their families.
The hard route: We describe this ruling as courageous because a lot of people react in a knee-jerk fashion when a claim is made that something even might endanger a city's police officers. It would have been easy -- and probably quite popular-- for the judge to agree with both the city and the police officers who wanted to claim a privacy right for what we consider public information.
But instead of taking the quick and easy route, Judge Smith studied the issue carefully and issued a 29-page opinion in which he wrote, "To deny members of the press access to public information . . . would silence the most important critics of governmental activity. This not only violates the Constitution, but eliminates the very protections the founders envisioned a free press would provide."
There has been a movement afoot for years in Ohio to cloak police personnel files in secrecy. While the rationale may be the safety of individual officers, the effect is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the press to investigate important public issues such as police misconduct or patterns of behavior by officers within police departments.
Appeal likely: A lawyer for the police officers says he'll appeal the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which ruled in favor of secrecy in a similar case in 1998. He seems to think the court will overrule Judge Smith.
We prefer to hope that the court sees it was wrong in 1998. Society must balance the protection it enjoys from police departments against the need it has to let the sun shine on how police departments and their personnel do the job entrusted to them.