Change puts criminal data in context By Jack Sullivan
The Forum
The Fargo Police Department has changed how it releases criminal-background information in response to criticism from a local advocacy group.
“We didn’t have a problem with the way Fargo was doing things – but they made things better,” said Duke Schempp, executive director of the People Escaping Poverty Project.
In April, Schempp and other PEPP representatives said local police departments’ crime-free apartment programs release too much information about prospective tenants when they conduct background checks for landlords.
They contended the information can be inaccurate or misleading and be a basis for unfair treatment by landlords.
Fargo police can’t release less information due to state open-record laws, Police Chief Christopher Magnus told Schempp and two other PEPP representatives at a meeting last week.
“If it’s a record that we maintain, we have to release it,” Magnus said.
But the department now will also release written explanations of what the records represent to help people not familiar with the information put it in context.
For example, Fargo police now notify record applicants that:
E Dispatch logs of police calls to individual addresses do not reflect who lived at the residence at the time of the call.
E The “incident” category listed on a dispatch log may not reflect “what the actual nature of the call turned out to be.”
E Arrest records do not show whether the suspect was convicted, acquitted or cleared.
And with every arrest record it releases, the department will give information on how to request case-disposition information from Fargo Municipal Court, Cass County District Court or the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
The changes will “help people be better consumers of this information” and “promote responsible use of the information so innocent people don’t get hurt” by misunderstood records, Magnus told PEPP members at the Police Department Thursday.
“That’s been our main concern, and we’re glad you take it seriously,” Schempp replied.
About 500 Fargo landlords participate in the city’s crime-free housing program, program coordinator Deb Tellinghuisen said.
The department conducted 977 criminal-background checks in May for landlords, she said.
It averages between 500 and 800 requests per month.
PEPP levied most of its criticism in April against the Moorhead Police Department. In response, Moorhead Police Chief Grant Weyland said Minnesota law makes public all contacts with police, and the city couldn’t selectively edit the reports.
PEPP will ask Moorhead officials to review Fargo’s policy and consider changing their own, Schempp said.
The new documents Fargo drafted will be attached to every public-record request, not just those from landlords, Magnus said.
“It’s not a perfect world in the sense there’s a tradeoff for open records … the tradeoff is open information can do a lot of harm as well as good,” he said.
By Jack Sullivan
The Forum - 06/18/2000