The Privacy Duality of the LPD

[XLFD]

On April 14th, the Ludington City Council will review and potentially decide a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appeal based on what appears to be unlawful redactions of a police body cam video, recently received by the Ludington Torch after a protracted court battle with the City of Ludington (COL) over a pattern of unlawfully enacted FOIA fees in two schemes designed by Ludington City Attorney Ross "Sewage" Hammersley.  This appeal is based on the principle that public records should be shared fully with the public, unless there is a legally recognized exemption that allows a public body to edit the record.  

The record under question is quite dramatic.  The three minute video (supplied later in this article and reviewed in detail here) shows older business-owner Joe Oquist being thrown around like a rag doll by LPD Officer Jared Versluis for what was said to be a disturbing the peace charge, initiated by the former city manager, who lived about as far away from Oquist as anybody could and still be within the city limits.  Versluis himself would be objectively guilty of trespassing on Oquist's property and a couple of assaults until he would declare Oquist under arrest that evening, but for some reason, those charges have been overlooked. 

When one looks at the video of the outside assault/arrest, one regularly sees some black squares dance around the periphery obscuring the outside of Joe Oquist's house.  These are edits presumably made by lung-puncturing Captain Mike Haveman, who fortunately had enough integrity to not cover up his own involvement that night.  The rationale behind these edits is given as that they are exempting out footage of what is a "private place".  In reality, the only thing being edited out is what anybody from the public can see while being on public property. 

One may ask why Captain Haveman would waste his time in finding a lot of unnecessary, unlawful edits of a public record.  It becomes clearer when one sees that they need to justify their outrageous, illegally-imposed fee scheme which claims that every minute of any police video taken needs three minutes to review and redact exemptions-- even when no exemptions are claimed or are present.  Ludington's latest FOIA policy is to throw in related footage that wasn't requested and charge many hundreds of dollars for a totally nonexempt video lasting only a few minutes.  This is not only public extortion, it's racketeering for profit and government non-transparency.

FOIA is a pro-disclosure statute and Michigan's supreme court has always ruled that exemptions in public records are to be narrowly construed, meaning that those public bodies who would make exemptions better have a damn good reason for it.  One may note the irony that the police involved with the police brutality and unlawful arrest of Joe Oquist weren't really concerned with his rights to privacy that night, or any of his other civil rights, but now film editor Captain Haveman wants to say that viewing the side of Oquist's home, visible from public alleys and sidewalks, is invasive of his privacy.  

A couple of weeks ago I sent a FOIA appeal on the principle that illegal exemptions invoked by Haveman were illegal under FOIA and secondarily under the bodycam privacy act.  It went like this:

Councilors,

This is an appeal of unlawful redactions made in a recently received FOIA response, the redactions of non-exempt material being a denial in part of the public record received, body cam footage. At about this time last year, the council unanimously decided that body cam footage of the 2-29-2024 arrest of businessman Joe Oquist by LPD Officer Jared Versluis, with brutal assist by Captain Mike Haveman, had a fee properly assessed at around $120.

That fee supposedly amounted to two hours of redacting the requested footage by Haveman, who knew that the arrest that took under three minutes would have no exempt material therein as it was enacted outdoors, the arrested was the only person in the video other than LPD, and there were no other issues of personal privacy being violated. Haveman was there he knew what happened which was: Versluis trespassed onto Oquist's curtilage on only City Manager Foster's noise complaint for a property two miles from his own home, assaulted Oquist by dangerously dragging him down the stairs of his own home, further assaulted him before finally telling Oquist he was under arrest, then throwing the unresisting but shocked sexagenarian down on the hard February ground. The video given me is provided here so you can look at the severe violations of police procedures yourself.

This is when Haveman's sadistic tendencies came into play, he rushed into the fray as if he was a shark that saw blood in the water and did his best Derek Chauvin impression on the upper back of Oquist. Oquist would never receive medical attention that night, but a doctor's visit after he got out of jail showed that his lung was punctured by the force of this unnecessary maneuver by your police captain.

The city attorney related that the less than three minutes of video I requested required 120 minutes of editing time, a number given to him by Haveman, who had a very good reason for blocking the release of this material, showing him and Versluis acting like little more than savage gang members rather than Ludington's finest as they brutalized a man on his own curtilage.

But Haveman was not through, he had to find some sort of validation for his claim that it would take two hours to redact exemptions. Rather than give me unedited footage from a totally non-exempt record, he regularly blocks out, without any valid exemption claimed, outside views of Oquist's front porch with darkened windows as seen from the outside.

The picture attached to this email was taken by me from the alley behind Oquist's house of that porch with all of those windows around it. If any of the cops actually used Oquist's paved sidewalk leading to his back door, they could look in that area lawfully; the exterior view of that area is not a "private place" and should never have been exempted. This is busy work; it's a guilty pig trying to conceal his crimes now that the court case I had to file to get proper release of this and two other withheld FOIA responses with hundreds of dollars of unlawful fees assessed by your very crooked city attorney by creating fake exemptions.

Please put this on the agenda of your next regular meeting. I will forfeit my first public comment if I can play the relevant three minutes of this video on the big screen you have in the council chambers and describe the issues with it when it comes time for your consideration of the issues involved with this appeal. I will otherwise allow the atrocities seen in this video to speak for itself. Thank you and remember it's your integrity as a public servant on the line if you look the other way during times like this, when perhaps your most valued public service is not functioning properly and within the law.

Unsurprisingly, the council has not contacted me in the meantime and offered to allow me the forum at today's city council meeting to discuss why FOIA Coordinator Ross "Sewage" Hammersley gave us an unlawfully edited video.  In the packet for the meeting, they allow him to offer a ludicrous six-page defense (beginning on page 91) of the black square redactions which shows his lack of understanding of the basics of FOIA law. 

One would hope that Hammersley would address exactly why the black squares are needed to cover up the outside of a house with porch windows that would be as black as the unlawfully placed squares, but in those six pages he relies on generalities and attempts to place a burden of proof on the appellant, rather than try to explain why the exterior of a house one can see clearly from other public places should be exempt on the police video.

One can see the window and exterior wall of Oquist's living room in this still photo from the video, so why is that left in?  The proper defense for the city in this case is to admit that they made a mistake in blocking out more than what they should have.  For had the city attorney chose to look at what a "private place" is in the prevailing law he would see that there is no good way to defend the appeal and at the same time defend the illegal actions of the police that night.  

Because the point here is that the law provides that bodycam footage "recorded in a public place" is exempt from disclosure and so if Hammersley declares exemptions under the bodycam privacy act as he did here, there is a tacit admission that Oquist was approached, accosted, and arrested by Officer Versluis in a "private place" without a warrant or any other exigencies.  That admission of a grander privacy violation against Oquist by the LPD is potentially even more damaging to the city's bottom line than seeing the City of Ludington once again go through the court system to defend their use of black squares in order to preserve Oquist's privacy rights that do not actually exist.

[Freedom Seeker]

Prayers that City Council will review this with honest hearts and quit covering up such atrocities at taxpayer's expense.

[XLFD]

Your prayers were 14% successful, one councilor, Jack Bulger, realized that there was no legal rationale to paint over non-exempt footage.  The other six, who never gave any indication that they even took a look at the edited footage, sided with the city attorney, who admitted he never looked at the footage-- and yet continued stating that the footage was taken inside the porch all through the twenty minutes of his presentation.  Ross Sewage couldn't even be bothered to take three minutes to review a video in order to write a six-page defense and cost the city 100s of dollars in preparation of it. 

This turned out to be only one of the city's cover ups that were revealed this evening in a 2.5 hour meeting, the other was more disturbing, and will be uncovered in an article tomorrow.

[Freedom Seeker]

Thanks X for the reply. Jack Bulger is a start! Thank you Jack for standing up for what is right (in uncovering the wrong). At least it makes the other Counselors think there is more than blind one-sided cult-like voting together to cover the crooked attorney and cover up for city wrongdoing. Those "cult-thinking" Councilors are probably afraid to break away.