I ranked 50 cities by government transparency. Philly came in last. | Opinion

When George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, Mike Dank did what he does best: He dug for information.

“During the George Floyd protests within Philadelphia and throughout the country, there were many questions about what the police [were] recording and how they handled and treated that resulting data,” Dank, an advocate for greater government transparency based in Delaware County, told me.

Of all the 22 public-records requests he’s made since 2018, under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, he hasn’t gotten data for any of them — even though he’s sometimes found the records afterward on public agency websites. He said he’s “most disappointed that my request to the Philadelphia Police Department regarding body-worn cameras was not filled.”

Philly transparency activists are often miserable. Because Philadelphia does a terrible job with transparency.

Philadelphia does a terrible job with transparency.

Back in 2020, I gathered data from a transparency tool called MuckRock, comparing the nation’s 50 largest metro areas to see how they ranked on responsiveness to public records requests. Specifically, I measured average response times and rates of success.

MuckRock does not come anywhere close to hosting all public records requests — no platform does. But it is unquestionably one of the largest platforms for hosting and managing such requests, with users around the country having filed more than 124,000 requests using the platform since its founding in 2010.

At the time of my 2020 analysis, Portland, Ore., snagged the dubious honor of least responsive metro. As a software developer, I wrote some code to automatically run the same analysis every month.

I mostly forgot about the whole project. Until now.

During the intervening years, it turns out, a few things have changed. Portland has been getting steadily better at successfully providing data. And Philadelphia has gotten worse.

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Philly municipal and regional agencies now have the lowest success rate for public records requests out of any metro area in the ranking, with less than 14% of MuckRock-hosted requests being successful.

Why is this? And how can it be changed?

To answer that, it’s worth visiting 1957, when the first version of Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law was passed. The law predated the federal Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) by a decade, and it showed: The attitude at the time was that government documents were private unless explicitly made public.

While later revisions to the law — most recently in 2008 — changed that policy, an overcautious culture remained, according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at Penn. The report found that obfuscatory and reticent habits remain deeply embedded in the way that city, regional, and state government staffers approached communicating with the public.

That sense of official apprehension, the report says, can make the state seem backward to new residents. Researchers cite journalists hired from other states into Pennsylvania jobs, talking about how public-records requests that would have resulted in documents within days at other places became an ordeal in Philadelphia. With skeptics now demanding transparency on a planned 76ers arena, the issue of public records is likely to stay relevant.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

According to the Penn report, one approach to more openness is the creation of a two-tier fee system for right-to-know requests, with commercial requesters paying more. As someone who has paid steep public record retrieval fees in other states, I’m a bit worried about leaving that decision up to governments. (And don’t get me started on how governments have made a dog’s breakfast of the debate over who is and isn’t a journalist.)

What else, then?

Other fixes could include tightening clauses that allow agencies to make exceptions to the assumption that records are public. Several experts I talked with for this piece also called for a revision of the rules triggering a 30-day extension in responses to requests, which are over-applied and can lead to a piece of information becoming outdated or even completely useless. There should be “a specific, articulated reason for delay,” Paula Knudsen Burke of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told me. Her organization sent a June letter to the city’s law department, suggesting ways to improve the current system.

Dank, the transparency advocate, told me that for metro Philly to improve on its dismal transparency ranking, exceptions and extensions need to be better documented. Most importantly, the region needs to adjust its entire approach to government information, changing from the default of “private” to “public.”

“Right now the whole system is a black box,” he told me. He and other transparency activists “don’t really understand how it works.”

Patrick Maynard’s writing from six countries — some of which is based on public records requests — has been featured in more than a dozen publications, including VICE, the Independent, and the Baltimore Sun. He spends much of his time developing software. Follow him on Twitter and Mastodon.