The Lens

By Matt Davis, The Lens staff writer

This is a post about how persistent one has to be to discover what may be happening when public agencies destroy computerized versions of records.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman is reviewing all of his office’s paid detail policies and expects to have new rules and regulations in place after the first of the year. The review comes after a joint investigation between FOX 8 and The Lens raised questions about when and where deputies work, the questionable chain of command, and how money is being spent from a detail fund. 

But it was difficult to track all the details through public records because the Sheriff’s Office destroys electronic databases used to record assignments, keeping only paper copies, an attorney for the sheriff said. That’s in spite of a state law that requires public agencies to keep all records it creates for at least three years.

From a reporter’s perspective, it would have been a lot easier to understand what was going on if the Sheriff’s Office kept hold of its computerized records.

The Lens decided to push on, regardless, in the absence of computerized records. To be as fair as possible to the Sheriff’s Office, The Lens requested three months’ paper copies of detail records, scanned them into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet using a character recognition program called Abby FineReader, then checked all the information against the originals to be sure it was accurate, and compared it against timecard information for a random selection of 14 sheriff’s deputies, by cross-referencing the information.

To understand public records on this story was a time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps.

In examining the New Orleans Police Department, the Department of Justice criticized a lack of centralized, organized recordkeeping for paid details, saying it creates an environment in which officers are able to bend the rules without getting caught. Similarly, because the records were only available in paper form, it took us six months of work with the Sheriff’s Office to barely scratch the surface of potential double-dipping issues with paid details.

We found three of the 14 deputies claiming taxpayer dollars when they also claimed to have been working paid details. If the Sheriff’s Office kept computerized records, we could have checked all the deputies out in a fraction of the time, and perhaps unmasked a broader issue.

Nevertheless the Sheriff’s Office said its interpretation of the law allows it to trash the electronic database and only keep a copy, even though State law requires public agencies to keep public records for at least three years, and the definition of a record includes any data kept in a computer.

“At the very least,” Gusman’s publicist Marc Ehrhardt wrote, “the point is arguable.”