The (Coudersport) Potter Leader-Enterprise, Oct. 11

Why the State Police should follow the law

This week has presented another good example of why the Pennsylvania State Police should follow the law rather than what they think the law ought to be.

George Osgood of the Elmira Star Gazette called Oct. 10 hoping we had the names of the Amish children injured when a car accidentally hit the buggy in which they were riding Oct. 8 in Harrison Township.

He didn't want their names to be sensationalist; he wanted the names so he could let people know how the kids were doing – hospitals won't release the condition of patients unless one calls with a full name. Under the federal HIPAA regulations, hospitals are strictly limited in the information they can release. No name, no information.

But the State Police will not release the names of juveniles.

It's a relatively new policy, cooked up in Harrisburg. The State Police claim the policy is based on law, but it's not, and they know it's not.

Even their own officers have admitted it's bogus. The law in Pennsylvania – known as the Juvenile Act – prevents the release of juveniles' names if they have committed a crime or have been the victim of abuse. If a juvenile is a passenger in a buggy that gets hit by a car, and that juvenile is life-flighted to a hospital for treatment, there is NOTHING in the law that says the State Police may not release the juvenile’s name so that reporters like George Osgood can let everyone in the community know the juvenile's condition.

It's important information.

Some people who are life-flighted are actually in relatively good condition and are out of the hospital in days; others are critically injured.

It makes a difference.

In a community like Potter County people take care of one another; when someone is seriously injured, people they don’t even know often donate to help pay for their care and recovery.

That process moves much more quickly if newspapers and radio stations can let everyone know what's going on. The State Police policy stands squarely in the way of that.

This creep toward increasing secrecy is neither according to law nor conducive to the public good. And make no mistake it is a steady creep toward secrecy.

In this latest example, the police are now withholding not only the names of juveniles but also the names of the hospitals to which they were taken.

When Gerri Miller, News Director for WFRM Radio, told an officer at the local barracks that people would want to know, the trooper responded "We're not releasing that."

At least Miller got a response.

When we called the local barracks for more information, no one returned the call. We called again. No response.

The lack of information reduced the Bradford Era to reporting that four of the Amish were "taken by emergency helicopter to an undisclosed area hospital." You'd think Dick Cheney had been in the back of that buggy.

No one does a better job of keeping people updated about local news than Gerri Miller at WFRM. She has struggled against this policy since it was instituted. Nothing frustrates her conscientious attempt to let us know as soon as possible more than the State Policy
withholding information that by law is public.

"It’s getting ridiculous," said Miller.

When we first complained about the new policy back in 2004, a State Police spokeswoman in Harrisburg tried to tell us it had always been this way. That was her story and she was sticking to it. It didn't matter that Gerri Miller's 25 years experience reading police reports over the air waves said otherwise.

Of course the State Police's own veteran press men knew – as Miller did – that the "official line" was bull, but in the this brave new world of increased secrecy, memories – especially accurate ones – are an annoyance.

Not until the Associated Press started snooping around the issue, did the State Police change their official story and admit the policy had not always been in existence.

It appeared obvious to those of us who had been arguing with them for months that the pressure of being caught in a big lie in a big way finally made the State Police a bit more honest.

They still didn't change the policy, but the example is instructive.

Not until threatened with statewide exposure by the Associated Press did the State Police in Harrisburg admit to history.

Prior to that, when dealing with local radio stations and local newspapers, they had attempted to rewrite history as they wanted it to be.

Just as the Soviets airbrushed people out of photos to "retouch" history to fit present politics, the State Police insisted their new policy was in fact old policy.

The frightening thing is that they have carried that attitude to their interpretation of the law itself. The law says we should be able to find out what hospital they flew those Amish kids to, and the law says we should be able to tell people what condition they are in.

But if the State Police say we aren't allowed to do something as simple as that, it makes you wonder what else the State Police have decided the public does not need to know.

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