LPD Privilege: Another Friendly DUI Released by LPD, Records not Released

[XLFD]

This reporter has been arguing with those who coordinate the release of public records from the City of Ludington for 19 years running, so it's not surprising that we find ourselves at loggerheads again with them over proper responses that comply with the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) law.  This time it's in regard to a credible report that one of Ludington's finest, LPD Officer Trey Forfinski was their representative at an accident happening early in the morning of December 24, 2025 which involved a young man allegedly driving very drunk and a utility pole he met that night.

While this was a one-vehicle incident, the damage was substantial to multiple utility poles according to the LFD who responded mainly for traffic control in the wee hours of the morning along with other agencies including both county law enforcement agencies and emergency management (according to the LFD's Facebook entry).  It is alleged that the young male driver was last seen highly intoxicated and definitely in no condition to drive.  The streets that night were fully cleared of snow and ice, the above photo taken after the car was towed away, shows where the vehicle left the street and struck the pole.  The only snow on the road is from the extrication of the vehicle from the deep snow in the streetside.

We heard of this incident right about the same time when the Mendez DWI incident records were coming out belatedly, showing that an LPD officer and his sergeant allowed an obviously drunk off duty LPD Officer Austin Mendez a pass after stopping his driving about twice the speed limit down Ludington Avenue during an early summer 2024 morning, dangerously passing other vehicles and swerving into roadside obstacles before finally stopping about a 1/4 mile after the on-duty officer put on his lights. 

In that case, LPD privilege was on full display.  Mendez not only avoided any sort of investigation, the LPD sergeant drove him home and secured his vehicle, and then he would receive two prestigious department awards at the end of the year and receive a promotion to sergeant the next year.  We have heard other credible reports that Mendez has been seen using stronger intoxicants, but this article is not his story.  He's just an additional example of what happened here to a young man who presented a danger to himself and his community before he was stopped from doing so by a power pole that jumped out in front of his car.  

This is another form of LPD privilege where one receives no enforcement action when driving very drunk and causing great damage to our utility grid; this happens when your friend on LPD is on duty.  Officer Forfinski allowed this young man (and we have his name at this point) to go home without any sort of blot on his driving record for the damage he caused after driving while impaired.  

Our readers know by now that we try our best not to speculate on things, this is why we regularly ask our public agencies to share public records through FOIA so that we can work our way towards the truth and answer all of the questions.  Since Mayor Mark Barnett has taken office and worked for the employment of an outcast from the east coast as police chief, Christopher Jones, we have seen the LPD resort to various methods of public extortion, a crime, in order to keep public records from the public that picture them in a bad light because most of those records depict camera footage, and much more likely to show a record that reflects the reality of what happened rather than the spin that is often seen on incident reports.

The LPD tries to conceal their records by a rather devious device, a constructed paywall that makes the concept of free public records a mockery.  One can request footage from a three minute outside arrest that had zero allowable FOIA exemptions that needed to be separated out, and they'll charge you $120 to separate out nothing, because of their illegal formula that will be struck down by the appellant courts.   This is what they are doing here and now to hide public records from their rightful owners.  And they are doing it strictly to keep those records from the media and the public.  

This latest incident shows they will continue in the new year to continue this shameful practice, a practice that your elected representatives continue to shamefully support, and your local circuit court judge, married to a longstanding city officer, will continue to see nothing wrong with.  My latest response asking for Body Worn Camera (BWC) during the Forfinski incident shows that paywall in action:

As you can read, the request is for footage of the incident scene upon Forfinski's arrival to the departure of his friend along with the associated incident report.  Other than some questions for the officer's report which might reflect the driver's address, phone number, and the like, the one-car accident scene happening during the middle of the night should have had no recognized exemptions allowed by FOIA. 

But that doesn't matter, the cost they apply to the footage is $131.36 and that's all for their illegal fee of charging three minutes of time for each one minute of video footage, even if there is nothing legitimate to exempt in the footage and they are aware of that.  In the past, they have not only regularly charged us that 3/1 rate for what we request, but for all of the other footage associated with the case that we had no interest in.  That may be what happened here because they want to charge for four hours (see below) of separating exempt information out of a record that may have at most a couple minutes of exempt material at the beginning where the driver would be asked for contact information.  

And of course, these lawbreakers do not even claim or establish any legal exemptions to be found in the records as required by FOIA in their response.  These are required by section 5(5)(a) of the FOIA:

All we are told, however, is that the non-exempt portion of the request has been granted pending payment-- of fees that are said to be used for the speculative labor of looking in-depth for exemptions not even claimed.  This lack of any sort of accountability and transparency should have the populace rising up with torches and pitchforks, but we're apparently more interested in what's happening in Minneapolis rather than our own backyard.

Lastly, it needs to be noted that all of the exemptions associated with the FOIA are discretionary-- a public body has no statutory duty to separate out exemptions if they decide not to; this has actually been pointed out a couple of times by city attorneys over the span of the last three city attorneys, to whit, all of the permitted exemptions are not mandatory to remove, but they "may exempt" them:

The word "may" in a legal sense is permissive and discretionary, recently reaffirmed in the SCOTUS meaning that the city "may exempt" some information, but it is not legally required to do so. 

Thus, when they have some administrative assistant spend four hours looking for optional exemptions they can't even define beforehand, it's an exercise that does nothing other than waste everyone's time and-- if this reporter was stupid enough to pay the public record ransom-- publicly extort my money.  That's a crime, another crime they are committing in order to have the public look the other way while the LPD gives another drunk driver a free LPD pass to continue on their way in the future. 

That is LPD privilege, your right to know is not.  If you wonder whether we at least received the written report of Forfinski-gate, we did not.  Even though we include language in each of our FOIA requests affirming that the information being sought is only being used for journalistic or statistical purposes, the LPD wants to make us always sign an affidavit for crash reports saying that we won't use it for marketing or soliciting purposes.