The Society of Professional Journalists has presented Connecticut State Police with a dubious honor – an award for lack of transparency with the press.
The SPJ organization gives its Black Hole Award for what it calls “outright contempt of the public’s right to know.” Previous winners include various state governments and the Trump administration.
The organization says the Connecticut State Police violated the state’s Freedom of Information laws nearly 30 times in the past decade. That includes withholding nearly a thousand documents related to the 2012 Newtown school shooting requested by the Hartford Courant. The Connecticut Supreme Court ordered the state to turn over those documents in 2018.
The Connecticut State Police beat out, among others, U.S. Senate GOP leadership for restrictions on the press during the Trump impeachment trial.
The Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection says it has made numerous changes over the past year to improve the public's access to records, including hiring new staff and increasing troop reports, and has seen a 46% reduction in its backlog.
"Although we live in a more automated world, for purposes of processing freedom of information requests, there remains the human, painstaking, time-consuming process of combing through records and weighing the citizen’s right to privacy against the public’s right to know," said a spokesperson for the department.