From the Hotline

By Teri Henning
Pennsylvania Newspaper Association

Q: What records should I be able to get from the local or state police?

A: The short answer is that police blotters and incident reports are public. Most other police investigative files are not public. Certain other administrative records that police departments may maintain, such as salary records or settlement agreements, are public.

When requesting police records, it is important to realize that there are two relevant statutes: 1) the Criminal History Record Information Act (“CHRIA”), 18 Pa.C.S. 9101 et seq.; and 2) the Right to Know Law.

CHRIA identifies certain documents as public. If the document that you are requesting is public under CHRIA, you are entitled to see it. In this case, there is no need to determine whether the document is a “public record” under the Right to Know Law.

On the other hand, if CHRIA does not specifically identify your document as public, you must resort to the Right to Know Law definitions. 

Under CHRIA, police blotters and press releases are public records. CHRIA defines a “police blotter” as "a chronological listing of arrests, usually documented contemporaneous with the incident, which may include, but is not limited to, the name and address of the individual charged and the alleged offenses."

To the extent that a police department maintains this information on computer (as opposed to a physical log), it should still be public.

Many police departments claim that they do not maintain a “blotter” as that term is defined in the Act. It is our position that any “daily log” that accounts for police activity qualifies as a blotter and should be made public.

The Pennsylvania courts have also found that "incident reports" are the same as police blotters, and that incident reports are therefore public records. See Tapco, Inc. v. Township of Newville, 695 A.2d 460 (Pa.Cmwlth. 1997). Again, incident reports are public under CHRIA (so the Right to Know Law definitions are irrelevant).

Unfortunately, Pennsylvania case law does not offer any detailed guidance on what qualifies as an “incident report.” We have always taken the position that an incident report is the report completed by the responding officer to an incident (in other words, the report that describes the initial police response to a particular incident).

As stated above, it is important to remember that if a document is public under CHRIA, it does not matter whether it would be public under the Right to Know Law. 

That being said, if the document that you are requesting is NOT public under CHRIA, you must resort to the Right to Know Law to determine whether the record is public. 

Many police records, including investigative files, are not public under the Right to Know Law. This is because the Law exempts records that would disclose the “institution, progress or results” of an agency’s investigation. 

Other administrative records, such as payroll records or settlement agreements involving the police, would be public under the Right to Know Law (although certain “private” information, such as Social Security Numbers could be redacted).