In the two-plus weeks since the story broke about the missing puppies in Altus, no one has covered himself in less glory – or drawn the ire of more Altusians – than Franklin County Sheriff Johnny Crocker.
From arresting would-be puppy rescuers for trespassing to proclaiming that he was “never gonna give you the location of these puppies,” Crocker turned what should have been a simple issue of rescuing neglected dogs into a full-blown controversy, with himself in the middle.
Collecting the facts around this case has been a challenge, partly because of Crocker’s non-compliance with the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
On Feb. 9, Crocker told radio journalist Mark Deitz at KDYN that Crocker has “received probably 300 death threats” and that his wife, deputies, jailers and dispatchers have also been threatened. That seemed like a lot of threats over a story about dogs missing in a county of barely 17,000 people, even if – as Franklin County Deputy Sheriff Jonathon Little claimed – “most of the people complaining aren’t even from here.”
So, on Feb. 14, I sent a FOIA request to Crocker:
Despite the requirements of the FOIA that records be produced more or less immediately and definitely no later than three business days after the request is made, a week passed without any response from Crocker. Yesterday, I reached out to him again, asking for the records to be provided before the end of the day.
Two hours later, Crocker responded:
That’s response does not meet Crocker’s requirements under Arkansas’s Freedom of Information Act. The law compels his office to produce any communications that fit the request, regardless of how they were received.
So I responded, explaining what the law requires.
Within half an hour, Crocker responded with some new reasoning. He now said the threats were being investigated and that records could not be produced until the investigation ended.
This latest response leaves us at a standstill, which is not an uncommon spot for journalists and government entities locked in disagreements over what information should be publicly available.
For now, we are left with some unanswered questions.
First, if there was an ongoing investigation into the threats at the time of my request, why didn’t Crocker say so right off the bat?
Second, Deputy Little, who works directly under Crocker, already stated that 99.9% of the threats came from outside of Franklin County. If the sheriff’s office knows this then they must have identified who the threats are from. And if that’s the case, Crocker and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department must have had at least some information about the threats received.
Third, it’s unlikely that the ongoing-investigation exemption of the Arkansas FOIA works here. Arkansas courts have routinely limited the ongoing-investigation exemption to internal documents that are “sufficiently investigative in nature to qualify for the exemption,” which amounts to “internal ‘work product’ materials containing details of an investigation.”
As the Arkansas Supreme Court wrote in Hengel v. City of Pine Bluff, the exemption excludes “only such matters as officers’ speculations of a suspect’s guilt, officers’ views as to the credibility of witnesses, statements by informants, ballistics reports, fingerprint comparisons, or blood and other laboratory tests.”
An unsolicited threat from a third party – even if it triggers an investigation – is not itself “sufficiently investigative” to trigger the exemption.