Dick May, author of the witty and perspicacious Seeing Greene blog, takes a potshot at the Catskill Village police force, for their longstanding practice of not providing public access to police reports:
NOT recorded in the Blotter, for the past four years, has been work done by Catskill Village police. That omission--of news about the work of GreeneLand’s largest local police force; of information about daily life in GreeneLand’s county seat and most populous community--is due most immediately to Village Police Chief Dave Darling. He pretends, contrary to established law, that his officers’ incident and action reports are not public documents. For his success in sustaining that fiction, Chief Darling depends on the acquiescence, if not the active support, of his employers: the Village Trustees. And for the endurance of their collusion in this law-snubbing practice, the Trustees and the chief depend on the passivity of appropriate protestors, such as publishers of newspapers and, gulp, of news blogs.
In his defense, Darling claims that there's no way to provide reporters with free access to digital police reports. (After all, people, the Internet is not something that you dump something on, like a big truck.)
For general reference: Guide to New York State Freedom of Information Law.
