This cannot be the scenario the crafters of Iowa’s open-records law envisioned.
The Register's editorial| Des Moines Register
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- The Dallas County attorney says she has no plans to release information from the DCI's inquiry
- With no apparent criminal case, disclosure is entirely in prosecutor’s hands
- Many pertinent questions about the Iowa school shooting are unanswered
State investigators’ findings about January’s deadly school shooting in Perry should be made public.
Dallas County Attorney Jeannine Ritchie should stop withholding them and allow Iowans’ understanding of the tragedy to be informed by facts, not by speculation.
Ritchie says she has no plan to release the Division of Criminal Investigation’s report on the Jan. 4 shooting. She now faces resistance from Perry’s mayor, school teachers and open-government advocates. A sixth-grade student and the high school principal were fatally injured and seven other people were wounded before the shooter, 17-year-old Perry High School student, died by suicide, law enforcement officials have said.
More: Iowa officials need an attitude adjustment when it comes to trying to keep secrets
With no apparent criminal case, disclosure is entirely in prosecutor’s hands
The dispute is the highest-profile manifestation of friction that has been brewing for years over the expansiveness of the Iowa law that gives police and prosecutors discretion to withhold “peace officers’ investigative reports” indefinitely. The Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that such reports can remain secret even after the related investigation has concluded.
In practice, this means that once police have disclosed the “immediate facts and circ*mstances surrounding a crime or incident,” they get to choose whether or not to say anything else, forever. Even at that, the information on "immediate facts and circ*mstances” in Perry has been scant. The public has never been informed about the exact type of weapon involved or how the shooter obtained it; the identities, ages and extent of the injuries suffered by those who were wounded but survived; a possible motive; whether the shooter signaled his intent in any way; or whether security vulnerabilities at the school aided the tragedy.
More: Dallas County attorney won't release Perry High shootings report. How about her successor?
Often more detailed information becomes public during a prosecution. But with the shooter dead, there has been no indication that criminal charges will be filed in the Perry case.
This cannot be the scenario the crafters of Iowa’s open-records law envisioned: that Iowans’ ability to learn anything formal about a mass shooting at a public school would turn solely on whether the shooter survived to stand trial.
Public officials sometimes imply that the exceptions in the open-records law tie their hands and require confidentiality. Often, that is not so. The exceptions merely put the question of release in the government’s hands.
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A civil lawsuit could pry loose the Perry report; the Iowa Supreme Court has said that public interest isan important factor in whether to compel disclosure. But it would be far easier for Ritchie to act in the interests of her constituents and within the pro-openness spirit of state law and figure out a responsible way to release most or all of it.
Her current position is the most extreme possible. While educators, the news media and others would likely still balk at this strategy, Ritchie could write her own condensed summary of the report, or redact pages and pages of it. Either would at least be a middle ground of sorts.
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What the Perry school shooting report could tell us
The public needs a better understanding of the Perry shooting, which can happen without chilling people from talking to investigators in the future and without airing irrelevant personal matters. That understanding should include information about the shooter’s experiences and actions leading up to Jan. 4. It should include precise details about movements and timing that morning that could illuminate the efficacy of school shooting prevention and response procedures.
Instead, as it stands, this information void invites guessing, in both good faith and bad faith, about motives and about what worked and what didn’t. The public release of this sort of investigation made clear the scope of law enforcement’s failure at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, setting the stage for reform. Conversely, disclosures showed the professionalism and effectiveness of police who intervened at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, last year. Authorities in Tennessee have declined to make public the shooter’s journal, but that argument is about disclosing evidence, not documents produced by state investigators, which should be an easy call in Iowa.
Dallas County supervisors promoted Ritchie to the county attorney job in 2023 after her boss became a judge, and she took an oath to discharge the duties of the job in the name of the county’s 100,000-plus residents. For their sake, Ritchie should reverse course. The public deserves to know what the DCI found in Perry.
Lucas Grundmeier, on behalf of the Register's editorial board
This editorial is the opinion of the Des Moines Register's editorial board: Carol Hunter, executive editor; Lucas Grundmeier, opinion editor; and Richard Doak and Rox Laird, editorial board members.
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