An Open Letter Showing the Crimes Behind the Fees

[XLFD]

Earlier today, I sent a letter to all Ludington City Councilors, appealing the fees of three different FOIA requests made before the advent of a new FOIA Policy, a policy drafted by the same city attorney who imposed outrageous fees for public information which effectively gives him the ability to create his own policy when there are public records that the city would rather not give out.  These public records belong to us, we paid for the means of making them and as an investigative alternative journalist, I will not tolerate a city attorney and police chief that have perverted our city's transparency to a point where it is the worst in our county.  

I have made three FOIA requests over the last two months dealing with the arrests of Ludington citizens.  For two of those requests, I have damning videos of the arresting encounter that show LPD acting in a very bad light, at least by first impression.  I have thus sought the LPD's body cams of those incidents to see whether there was any cause for the troubling videos I have, even though I can't think of anything that might refute what they show. 

A respectable PD with nothing to hide would take pains to get the videos out and explain why their officers are acting properly, the LPD with the assistance of City Attorney Ross Hammersley (acting very unprofessionally and illegally) are not following that course.  They have chosen to ask for hundreds of dollars (as high as $900) for videos of arrests taking place, covering a couple minutes of time, and they do this after many years of providing this reporter with complimentary body cam footage and no officially authorized changes of policy.   I included this information and some thoughts on the state of our city 'law' leadership, which has been seriously going downhill for two years, in a FOIA fee appeal to the Ludington City Council which I share here with some additional links for clarification:

Councilors,

This is a FOIA fee appeal for responses to FOIA requests dated 2-11-24, 2-18-24 and 3-31-24, all regarding LPD arrests and bodycam footage of those arrests. I have created a listing of FOIA responses for similar LPD materials made since mid 2021, when I started asking for bodycam footage for various police incidents where I had suspicions/witnesses indicating that something improper may have happened. The LPD Chief at the beginning of that earlier point was Tim Kozal, the FOIAC was Carlos Alvarado, when that changed to the current ones is noted in the 'timeline'. The date of my request is followed by a description of what it was for, and the cost given to me:

JUL 01, 2021: police report + body/dash cams, $0

JUL 27, 2021: police report + bodycams, $0

AUG 19, 2021: police report + bodycams, $0

SEP 06, 2021: arrest report + bodycams, $0

SEP 23, 2021: arrest report + bodycams, $0

OCT 11, 2021: ped. accident + bodycams, $0

JAN 27, 2022: investigation, SRO body cams, $0

MAY 11, 2022: arrest report + bodycams, $0

MAY 09, 2022: Case filings, bodycam evidence, $0

JUN 18, 2022: incident report + bodycams, $0

AUG 10, 2022: arrest report + bodycams, $0

SEP 15, 2022: arrest report + bodycams, $0

DEC 12, 2022: Traffic Stop + bodycams, $0

New FOIAC Ross Hammersley

JAN 24, 2023: Traffic Stop + bodycam, $0

New LPD Chief Chris Jones

MAR 30, 2023: arrest report + bodycam, $0

JUL 13, 2023: arrest report + bodycams, $0

SEP 13, 2023: arrest report + bodycams, $0

OCT 19, 2023: incident report + investigation, $$0

DEC 03, 2023: arrest report + bodycams, $0

FEB 11, 2024: arrest report + bodycams, $229.38 => $423.80

FEB 18, 2024: arrest report + bodycams, $879.41

MAR 31, 2024: arrest report + bodycams, $108.24

APR 08, 2024: Council passes new FOIA policy giving wide latitude for frivolous charges to requestor

As you can see, with an unchanged FOIA policy until this April 8th, I received bodycam footage free of charge for 18 separate and consecutive incidents before 2-13-24, when I received a $229.38 price tag for an outdoor arrest, an arrest that the MCSO had already provided me with their own deputy's bodycam footage for free. It showed an arrest that took place within a minute of LPD Officer Austin Morris making contact with the arrestee who was unaware of why he was being arrested before being physically assaulted (as seen in the MCSO bodycams).

I can fully understand why the LPD would be averse to releasing this proof of their own officer's wrongdoing, but for Ross Hammersley to create a new FOIA Cost Estimation Worksheet, one that had never been used before this year and never approved by the city council was just as criminal as Officer Morris' assault. You can see from the list that both he and Chief Jones had furnished at least five 'bodycam combos' totally free of charge, most involving more complex scenarios than an outdoor arrest without any victim of a crime present and lasting a couple minutes where it would be reasonable to assume there were no exemptions to be lawfully claimed by either the state FOIA or Act 85 of 2017 regulating body worn cameras.

Sec 4(3) of the FOIA notes in relevant part: " A fee shall not be charged for the cost of the deletion and separation of exempt from nonexempt information unless failure to charge a fee would result in unreasonably high costs to the public body because of the nature of the request in the particular instance, and the public body specifically identifies the nature of these unreasonably high costs."

As noted, 18 body cam requests in a 3-year period were deemed not to have unreasonably high costs to the COL/LPD and Karla Gerds, Hammersley's secretary, informed me that they were charging hundreds of dollars because of there being a 'lot of videos'. This coincided with the use of a FOIA Cost Estimation Worksheet that I saw for the first time, because it was never approved by the city council, first used here by your law firm for me and which charged a uniform rate of $25 per video.

Such charges do not follow city or state FOIA law or policy, your attorney was trying to charge unlawful fees for public records above and beyond what he could legally charge. He broke the law using his secretary as his tool. You should demand an ethically uncompromised attorney from his law firm, or find a new law firm as I will continue bringing this crime and the follow-up criminality to light for years if he remains unchecked.

Compounding his crime, he decided he would go against 18 precedents of city FOIA policy and charge $424 in an amended FOIA response suggesting that it would take a supervisor nearly a full day to separate exempt material from an outdoor arrest that took a couple minutes, that somehow has 15 videos that needs to be reviewed in great detail to remove exempt material still not fully detailed. He also claimed this supervisor/captain would bring down over $54 per 1/4 hour (or nearly $220 per hour) for his services when the then-current FOIA policy (attached) shows that rate as $35.13, this is still on the city website under "Open Government". When the COL announced the open police chief position last year, the salary range was given as $78-93K per year (Police-Chief-Recruitment-Brochure-Dec-2022 (ludington.mi.us)) Captain Haveman's salary plus benefits is at best half of what Hammersley is wanting to charge me, this is public extortion too.

I am going to the MCSO on Monday to file a second public extortion complaint, as he continues to use that unreal rate for the other two FOIA responses. I will be filing a second complaint to the Attorney Grievance Commission. You should not condone such criminality by letting this public outrage continue unabated.

To be compliant with the past policy, where I received 18 similar-and-mostly-simpler FOIA requests without charge, the city should supply the videos free of charge or be complicit with Hammersley's public extortion. You could show the public at-large that this was an isolated criminal act of retaliation against someone who is holding the city to account for its basic lawlessness over the past two years, coinciding with the advent of our new mayor and his past corruption as police chief, especially with FOIA when he tried to charge me $2500 for 120 pages of a police report and interview transcript for a case that was fully tried and that used both in court proceedings and should have already been shared with the public at no cost.

The second FOIA Fee appeal amounts to an $879.41 charge for another incident report and body cam footage pursuant to a warrant arrest and the arrest of a woman for not showing her papers or identifying herself while in the comfort of her home. The incident happened mostly inside a residence, so I would expect the redaction of all video inside that residence to preserve their privacy, but otherwise, Hammersley does not suggest why a couple of arrests taking place in a few minutes of time would cost nearly $1000. This figure envisions Captain Haveman, at the false $220/hour pay rate taking over 64 hours, over 6 work days, to edit the video corresponding to my explicit request of only "body cam footage of the arrest of two individuals". If I take the police at their word in the MCP report of their news release, these individuals were arrested within mere minutes of each other in an area where video would be automatically blacked out, so how can you believe it takes 6 full days to edit out PPI words from a ten-minute or less encounter?

You don't believe that; Hammersley has no basis to charge anything for this 15-30 minute tops FOIA response of them arresting the shark-dressed man and a woman who acted within her rights inside her home. Releasing these records will assuredly show the arrest of the woman was illegal and improper, which is probably why I'm being charged about $1000 above what the policy allowed for. The council made a big statement on Monday by passing a new FOIA Policy that would allow your criminal attorney to charge anything he feels like charging without repercussions or any accountability for his past criminal acts detailed here.

Lastly, in a request much like the first, where I already have a security video and audio from a local business owner which shows that he was beset upon and attacked by Officer Jared Versluis and Captain Haveman on (ironically) Leap Day, 2-29-2024. The actual arrest happens within seconds of Versluis' assault on him for an unstated infraction, the takedown is clear on the footage I have, where all the action happens within three minutes, all outside, all without the mention or view of anything personal or private.

The businessman was originally charged with resisting and opposing when his video shows nothing of the sort during the time he was victimized and brutalized. For the video, which might include an unwarranted three-minute ride to the jail that I didn't ask for, Captain Haveman, personally knowing there is nothing to redact in the video, says it will take him two 1/4 hours to edit, or at least Hammersley puts that down on the cost estimation worksheet, along with his falsely-inflated $220/hour compensation.

The FOIA policy that was in existence when I made the request says that this is an illegal charge, in section V(a) of that policy it explains that unreasonably high costs to the city only occurs when more than one-half hour is devoted to fulfilling a FOIA request. Two quarter hours is 1/2 hour, so according to city FOIA policy, Hammersley is again attempting to public extort me again. If he is doing this fraud and extortion with someone with as much FOIA knowledge as me, he must be making an awful lot on other willing dupes. Or he's looking forward to grift some more cash from our citizens by representing the city when it goes to the circuit court after he advises you to back him up for all of the improprieties noted here and deny all three FOIA fee appeals. It's a great move as far as job security goes.

I am thus appealing all three FOIA Fees as illegal, and I will pursue this in the local circuit court if the city council does not start cleaning their house and quit going against the tenets of transparency. Please expedite this fee appeal at your next meeting, so that I can try and help the real victims here, those unlawfully arrested and harassed by the poorly-trained and poorly-led LPD, who are violating their own policies and state laws in doing their jobs.

[Willy]

Thanks for the post X. You could write these people a book of letters and they could not see that what they are doing is contrary to what they have been employed to do. They either do not understand or just don't give a damn about ethics or honesty. The people running Ludington are truly a ship of fools.

https://ludingtoncitizen.ning.com/photo/ship-of-fools?context=user