Before the Legislature exempted the patrol’s audio and video from the Oklahoma Open Records Act in 2005, anyone could buy a copy of a video for $25. Here’s the part of the legislation that was removed:

E. The Commissioner and any other officers of the Department as the Commissioner may designate are hereby authorized to prepare copies of videotape recordings which are not exempt law enforcement records, as prescribed in Section 24A.8 of Title 51 of the Oklahoma Statutes, when held as records of the Department, and deliver upon request to any person a copy of a videotape recording, for a fee of Twenty-five Dollars ($25.00) for each copy. Any monies collected by the Department pursuant to this subsection shall be deposited to the credit of the Department of Public Safety Revolving Fund.

According to Mark Thomas of the Oklahoma Press Association, one of the reasons DPS asked the legislature to remove that part of the law followed a request from a reality TV production company for every video of every trooper on every shift. The agency couldn’t fulfill that request and asked for the change in law.

Of course, the agency also had recently lost a court case on the subject. Here’s the story from our archives:

Highway patrol ordered to stop withholding tapes
By Nolan Clay
Staff Writer

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Thursday, March 3, 2005 Edition: City, Section: NEWS, Page 6A

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A judge has barred the Oklahoma Highway Patrol from keeping videotapes of traffic arrests secret.

The ruling Friday came after an Oklahoma City attorney complained about a new restriction on the release of such videotapes.

“They don’t want these videos out. … They use any excuse that they can, even bad ones,” said attorney Stephen G. Fabian Jr., who specializes in drunken-driving cases.

Fabian has used the state Open Records Act to gather hundreds of videotapes from police departments and the patrol.

“We continue to find that many officers make up evidence and exaggerate their testimony about the events. These tapes are extremely important to a citizen who is wrongly accused,” he said.

The attorney sued the state Department of Public Safety in January after officials refused to release a videotape of a drunken-driving arrest. Officials said the attorney had to get the driver’s written consent first.

Oklahoma County District Judge Noma Gurich struck down that requirement as unlawful.

The Department of Public Safety said it was trying to prevent identity theft. An attorney for the agency told the judge the videotape had “personal information” that must be kept private under a federal law.

The department’s attorney said the videotape revealed the vehicle’s tag number and the driver’s image, address, full name and license number.

The attorney also said the driver in the videotape admits to “dipping Skoal” smokeless tobacco. The attorney said that “could be interpreted as ‘medical information’ that is considered protected ‘highly restricted personal information.’”

Meanwhile, if this issue comes up during the next session of the legislature, advocates for changing the law might have an ally in a former state commissioner of public safety. Bob Ricks, now the chief of police in Edmond, said he understands why DPS needs to keep the video footage out of the public realm — at least for a short time.

“Once a situation is over, I don’t have any hesitancy releasing those types of materials,” Ricks told me last week. “But initially you need to protect the information until an administrative or internal inquiry is over. Our policy in Edmond is we are prompt to release those things that don’t appear to be concerned with an administrative inquiry. You’ve got protect the rights of all involved, but I also believe in the First Amendment and getting information to the public as quickly as possible.”

For more on highway patrol video policies in other states, check out the Tulsa World story here.

–Paul

Overall, reported crime was down 2.5 percent from 2007. But in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, the incidents of violent crime rose.

Much of the conventional wisdom out there holds that when the economy sours, crime rises. But how does that explain the increase in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, both of which have been fairly insulated from the worsening economy in other parts of the country? (For what it’s worth, business magazine Forbes last year declared Oklahoma City as one of the nation’s most “recession-proof” cities.)

I came across a recent series put out by the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. In the March issue of their FedGazette,  bank researchers and economists looked into the relationship between the economy and crime:

The matter is complicated, at least somewhat, by findings from economic theory and empirical research. Though some research supports the conventional view of rising crime during economic downturns, a closer look at theory finds a more complex story, and empirical studies over the years haven’t found as solid a relationship as one might think between economic downturns and criminal activity. Many other factors are at play, from demographic changes and shifting cultural norms to legislative initiatives and technological innovation. Thus, forecasting crime trends—like predicting the weather or the economy—is an uncertain venture.

Researchers have different theories on the links between crime and the economy:

… Similarly, economist Philip Cook at Duke University recently examined the course of crime rates in urban areas of the United States in recent decades and concluded that “the statistical evidence presented here indicates that [the 1990s crime rate] decline, like the crime surge that preceded it, has been largely uncorrelated with changes in socioeconomic conditions.”

Others, like University of Missouri-St. Louis sociologist Richard Rosenfeld, future president of the American Society of Criminology, continue to hold that macroeconomic conditions do indeed have a strong influence on crime rates. “Crime rates are likely to increase as the economy sours,” Rosenfeld wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece in March 2008, which warned Angelenos “to brace themselves for more crime to come.”

But other scholars, including political scientist James Q. Wilson, former chair of the White House Task Force on Crime, are less certain. Almost a year after Rosenfeld predicted a rise in L.A. crime, Wilson wrote an editorial for the Los Angeles Times, noting that during 2008, crime had fallen in the city “at a time when the economy was reeling and unemployment was rising.”

Whatever the case, it helps to put the most recent FBI stats in context. The FBI itself cautions about drawing comparisons among cities:

Figures used in this Report are submitted voluntarily by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Individuals using these tabulations are cautioned against drawing conclusions by making direct comparisons between cities. Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents. Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction. It is important to remember that crime is a social problem and, therefore, a concern of the entire community. The efforts of law enforcement are limited to factors within its control. The data user is, therefore, cautioned against comparing statistical data of individual agencies.

Here’s the FBI preliminary stats for Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman. The full report, along with the stats of other Oklahoma cities, will be out later this year.

And if you’re still curious, another source of crime information is the National Crime Victimization Survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. It surveys people (rather than police departments), and its numbers are usually higher than the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. That’s because residents sometimes don’t report crimes to their local police departments.

–Paul

If Gov. Brad Henry has his way, tax delinquents could see their names posted online under a proposal unveiled in the Executive budget yesterday called “Open Taxes”

Governor Henry’s budget proposes joining 15 other states that list delinquent taxpayers on the Internet as a collection tool. This program requires contact of delinquent taxpayer to give them the opportunity to satisfy their tax debt or make payout arrangements within a set time period prior to listing on the Internet. The Governor’s budget includes $1.7 million in additional revenue from this program.

If the Legislature approves, Oklahoma could join states like Wisconsin, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania in listing the names of tax delinquents online.

Of course, there are privacy concerns, noted by a spokesman for the National Taxpayer Union in this USA Today article from 2005. What happens if you are wrongly included in the list?

Details from Henry’s proposal haven’t been released, so it’s unclear if Oklahoma’s program would include all tax delinquents or just the worst offenders.

Paula Ross, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Tax Commission, said the state brought in more than $115 million from its tax amnesty program last year called “Clean Slate.” (That program survived a constitutional challenge from Oklahoma City attorney Jerry Fent.)

Meanwhile, a survey from the Federation of Tax Administrators found that states could bring in between $1 million and $127 million in delinquent taxes by posting the names of offenders online.

–Paul

That’s the conclusion from the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center. It’s wrap-up of 2008 data breaches found that human errors — losing a laptop with sensitive data, sending a CD of data to the wrong address — accounted for most of the data breaches last year.

From its latest report:

Sadly, these trends continue to plague companies and government alike, despite education on safer information handling, new laws and regulations. Mal-attacks, hacking and insider theft, account for 29.6% of those breaches that reported the causal factor. Insider theft, now at 15.7%, has more than doubled between 2007 and 2008. On the other hand, data on the move and accidental exposure, both human error categories, showed noteworthy improvement, but still account for 35.2% of those breaches that indicate cause.

Here in Oklahoma, there are two laws on the books governing data breaches. The first, to do with government agencies, went into effect in 2006. The second, dealing with private businesses, was passed in the last Legislature and went into effect in November.

You can read the ITRC’s entire report here in PDF format. The list shows nine Oklahoma-related data breaches last year, including several businesses and government agencies.

Finally, a tip of the hat to the Washington Post, which has a story on the ITRC report here.

–Paul

Tulsa’s live crash mapping is here. They also have a listing of live police calls, sort of like a police scanner for the Web.

On a related note, a few smaller police departments in the state have contracted with a third-party vendor to put their crime maps on the Web:

Muskogee

Broken Arrow

–Paul

The full 2007 Crime in the United States offers some interesting facts on crime rates, clearance rates and information about police officers.

You can search for FBI-reported crimes in your community at our online database. There’s also a link from our Your Right to Know page.

–Paul

Here in Oklahoma, the preliminary statistics cover only cities of 100,000 or more. But you can check out the numbers of reported crimes for Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman. The FBI cautions against relying on strict comparisons between cities, for reasons spelled out here.

The FBI will release final crime statistics for 2007 in September. In the meantime, check out the FBI’s preliminary UCR Web site.

–Paul

The Oklahoman’s Julie Bisbee followed up on the blog post last Wednesday, with assurances from the department’s spokesman that all the problems had been fixed.

But the finger pointing continues in the comments section of the original blog. Judging by a few of the comments, several people who worked (or still work) in IT for the department are blaming their managers and the department in general:

In the spring of 2001 work on the Sex Offender Registry, a federally mandated and funded project, was begun. The rules in place at the time did not allow DOC to hire staff to build the system, so they outsourced the job to a less-than-entirely-legitimate consulting firm. The contract programmer who wrote the SOR had never worked in the development environment that was used. He had no real knowledge of database design or of Internet security. For that matter, the original statement of work for the project does not mention security.

Pre-Y2K, Internet security was (comparatively) in its infancy. We know for a fact that members of the DOC IT staff ASKED about security, but they were told that the issue was none of their business.

There’s no way to know if those are legitimate complaints or not, but a recent audit of the department (PDF link) pointed out several problems with its IT structure and management. The $1 million audit was requested by the Legislature in 2007 and done by a Texas-based corrections consulting firm, MGT of America Inc. Its main conclusion? The department is woefully underfunded by state government.

Starting on Section 7-29 (page 231 of the PDF), the audit faults the department for having a decentralized Information Technology Unit.

Management of IT functions resides in several different divisions, hampering coordination of services. The department’s core offender management information system is unreliable and requires significant upgrade or replacement. Ongoing planning and work on the internal development of a replacement for this system has been unsuccessful, leaving the department in an extremely vulnerable position.

The audit’s IT section doesn’t mention the publicly available Sex Offender registry Web site, but it does go on to detail the problems with the DOC’s internal databases.

Because of these issues, the agency is at a very critical point in its ability to effectively manage the offender population. The existing inmate database could fail at any time, leaving nothing to replace it. Staff would have to return to paper and pencil to manage and account for inmates and parolees. Any efficiencies that currently exist would disappear, increasing the demands on the state’s limited resources.

The Legislature recently approved some additional funds for the DOC for this fiscal year. But a budget agreement last week freezes spending for the 2009 fiscal year, so the IT changes for the department might have to wait.

–Paul