John Emry just wanted copies of a few police reports.

The public had paid the officers who wrote them, bought the cruisers they drove to the scene, paid for the paper they were written on or the computer they were typed on, paid the workers who ran the office in the Muncie Police Department where the computers and file cabinets sat.

Tax dollars even paid for the printers or copy machines that would make the copies of the reports that had been written for the public’s benefit.

But Muncie Police told Emry he’d have to pay them $5 for each report, whether they were one page or 50. Indiana law says public agencies can charge only 10 cents a page, or the actual cost of the paper and ink and running the copier, whichever is greater. Most agencies put the cost of making a photocopy at 9 cents or 10 cents a page.

Emry, an attorney in Franklin, complained to Indiana’s public access counselor. A month later, then-Public Access Counselor Heather Willis Neal agreed with Emry. That was in February 2008.

The Muncie Police Department, Neal noted, never bothered to respond to her. It did, however, get around to changing its fee: Four months later.

Emry certainly could have afforded the $5 fee, but he was not going to sell out the principle.

“If it’s not done according to the law, then I try to raise the issue,” Emry said. “It usually ends with the public access counselor’s opinion.”

Not always.

Fee never charged?

In 1999, the public access counselor said the Fort Wayne Police Department’s fee of $5 per police report was illegal because the city was improperly including labor costs in the fee. The legislature that year clarified that the fee could not include labor costs, and the city lowered the fee to 9 cents a page.

By June 2005, the access counselor was again calling the fee illegal after getting complaints that the department was charging $3 per police report.

In March 2006, however, the city was still charging $3.

Carol Taylor, then associate city attorney, said the city was “working on” fixing it.

More than a year later, the Fort Wayne City Council approved an ordinance changing the amounts the city charges for criminal history checks, fingerprints and traffic accident reports, but it did not change a fee for “Original Computer Reports,” which was $1 a page. The changes were signed into law April 17, 2007.

“I don’t think we’ve ever charged anyone a dollar (per page) for anything, but the ordinance should be updated,” said Taylor, now city attorney. “We have a lot of stuff that probably needs to be updated. … If someone were to bring it up as an issue, we would have to deal with it.”

In fact, after the 2007 changes a new sign appeared at the police department: “Effective May 1, 2007,” the sign says, “Original Computer Police Reports” will cost $1 a page for copies.

When told of the fee March 9, Taylor said she would “shoot an e-mail over to the police” and take care of it. The sign advertising the $1-a-page fee was still up Friday.

“It is difficult” to keep track of so many departments, Taylor said. “I had no idea what they were charging over there. Usually it comes to my attention when someone complains about a fee they’re being charged.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an Arlington, Va., advocacy group, said that’s what happens when agencies don’t have a commitment to openness.

“Just look at Florida. People understand that in Florida they are required to be transparent. It becomes part of the culture,” Dalglish said. “You need to instill a culture in your community that this is expected. If everybody knows they have to do it, it is not a burden on anyone.”

‘Rampant problem’

Dalglish said not having a culture of openness leads to all sorts of problems, from illegal fees to illegally locking citizens out of public meetings to illegally denying them records.

Part of the problem, she said, is simply that many government workers are not educated on the openness the law requires.

“It can be time consuming and off-putting that (as a public employee) everything you say and do, everybody has access to – that can take some getting used to,” Dalglish said. “A lot of people don’t realize, they think e-mail is like talking on the phone. … But that does not mean you don’t have to follow the law. You just have to suck it up and do it.”

The important thing to remember, she said, is these are public employees, in public offices, doing the public’s business.

“You are no longer a private citizen. You are working on the public’s behalf and that means the public is entitled to information about what you’re doing,” Dalglish said.

And that means even the public you don’t recognize, said Tony Fargo, an Indiana University professor of journalism specializing in media law. Often, he said, reporters will routinely be given documents that other citizens are routinely denied, even though the law requires the same access for everyone.

“That’s a fairly rampant problem,” Fargo said. “The way it often works is, … people get to know you and so when you ask for something they say, ‘Here you go.’ Then somebody else walks in off the street and instantly the suspicion radar goes up.”

When seven Indiana newspapers fanned out across the state in 1998 and again in 2004 to see how agencies responded to requests for public records, the answer was not only most often “No,” it was also often more akin to “How dare you?”

Instead of sending their regular reporters, the newspapers sent staffers unlikely to be recognized, staffers who were then questioned, harassed, intimidated and in at least one case investigated – all for asking for what state law says they are entitled to have.

Of course, Indiana is hardly alone in having officials who have trouble following the law. In Illinois recently, when the state department of health released a report on groundwater contamination some say may be linked to a rash of rare brain tumors, it held back clippings of newspaper articles about the case that had been included in the report’s appendix.

The too-dangerous-to-release newspaper stories had been written by the same newspaper asking for the report.

“You hear those kinds of things, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Fargo said.

‘Something smelly’

Dalglish of the Reporters Committee said citizens often assume the public records and open-meetings fights that journalists wage have little or no relevance to them – until a hog farm wants to locate nearby or corruption is exposed.

“It’s easy to become complacent,” Dalglish said. “For most of us, it only becomes important when something happens.”

Public-access laws in Illinois were strengthened only after its second consecutive governor was indicted on federal corruption charges.

Fargo said the point comes home to people when they try to interact with government and are met with resistance.

“They tend to dismiss the people who jump up and down and scream at meetings saying, ‘Why won’t you tell me anything?’ ” he said, “until they find out something smelly’s going to go next door.”

Then when they ask for basic information they’re told they can’t have it.

“You want to find things out and they won’t tell you,” he said. “Suddenly, it becomes clear to you why we have these laws.”

dstockman@jg.net