Court orders Sandy Springs to share police documents in open records lawsuit

Leftridge also said in her order Appen Media may submit an affidavit seeking reimbursement for reasonable attorney fees and expenses.

It’s a win for Appen Media, owner of newspapers including the Sandy Springs Crier. But it does not yet bring an end to the lawsuit that media ethicist Richard T. Griffiths calls one of the most important open records cases he has seen in Georgia in a long time.

“If the city of Sandy Springs prevails, it will gut the Open Records Act related to law enforcement,” said Griffiths, a former CNN executive and Georgia First Amendment Foundation board member. “It will allow cities, municipalities and sheriff’s departments around the state to totally clam up about what law enforcement activity is happening in their communities.”

Representatives for Sandy Springs declined to comment.

Appen Media sued the city in May 2023, alleging the city refused to produce detailed police officer narratives in response to requests for incident reports made under the Georgia Open Records Act. It is seeking the records “without redacted or truncated narratives,” as well as for the city to pay its legal fees.

Generally speaking, police and sheriff’s offices routinely produce initial reports that detail information about incidents, including narratives written by responding officers. Appen Media alleged Sandy Springs typically releases only a one-line report, withholding the larger narrative.

The reports the city provided generally lacked any further detail on the nature of the crime, injuries or property damage and whether any arrests were made, among other information. This was different from incident reports provided by police agencies in other jurisdictions.

Without this information, a crime could occur in the city and the public would not know what it was for six months to a year-plus, if not longer, said Carl Appen, the media organization’s director of content and development.

“So it sort of allows the city to operate with less scrutiny,” Carl Appen said.

The Open Records Act requires Georgia governmental entities to produce records for public inspection, but it allows some exceptions, one of which is police investigative files for cases that have not been closed. But initial crime and incident reports are required to be made available to public inspection.

Sandy Springs said the police department doesn’t redact the narratives and doesn’t include them as part of the initial report, even if they are drafted at the same time. Instead, the narratives are part of “supplemental” filings and are withheld until an investigation has been concluded.

In December 2023, a Fulton County judge ruled in favor of Sandy Springs, citing a police captain’s deposition describing that the initial and supplemental reports are handled differently, and supplemental reports are used as part of pending investigations.

Appen Media then appealed the decision to the higher state court. In March of last year, the Court of Appeals rejected the lower court ruling, writing in its opinion that it was premature. There is no blanket rule determining whether a narrative report prepared at the same time as an incident report makes it part of the initial report. The case was then sent back to Fulton County Superior Court.

The media organization then filed a motion for Sandy Springs to complete the discovery process from the initial phase of the trial. According to the Jan. 22 order, the city provided the reports for all closed cases but refused to produce supplemental reports for any cases considered open.

What comes next

Since the Jan. 22 order, Sandy Springs has filed two motions: one seeking immediate review and another asking the court to reconsider the ruling, holding its stance that information contained in a report made by an investigating officer in an open case is protected from disclosure.

Challenges lie ahead for Appen Media. For one, Sandy Springs has a substantial amount of public money it can spend fighting the case, whereas Appen Media is a small news organization with limited resources.

So far, Appen Media has spent about $100,000 in attorney’s fees, Carl Appen said. Sandy Springs has paid about half that in its own legal fees between January 2023 and January 2026, according to a figure Carl Appen received from a city spokesperson in an email.

Another challenge is a shift away from entirely transparent operations in some quarters of the government. Griffiths said the Appen lawsuit is a small-city reflection of what’s happening at the federal and state level.

During last year’s legislative session, Georgia lawmakers tried to add various exemptions to the Open Records Act under a three-page bill initially drafted to clarify the process of requesting public records maintained by private entities. The changes to the bill, added two days before the end of the session, would have further restricted the information the police must disclose to the public after a crime occurs.

It included language that explicitly addressed initial incident reports. It narrowed the information the police must disclose after a crime occurs to “the first incident report completed on a standard incident report form,” according to a copy of the bill obtained by the Current.

The House drew back from the changes and passed the bill in its original, three-page form.

A measure including the exemptions that were shelved last year hasn’t been drafted in this year’s ongoing legislative session, though there is still more than a month before the session adjourns.

Griffiths believes the Sandy Springs case will inevitably go before the Georgia Supreme Court. The city will then have an uphill battle because the court has always sided with transparency, he said.

“The city of Sandy Springs is making an extraordinary argument that runs against the tradition in the state and the law in the state,” Griffiths said. “What they are telling their citizens is that ‘you don’t need to see what we’re doing. You don’t need to know what’s happening in your community. Look the other way. Nothing to see here.’”

“That’s terrifying for a law enforcement entity to claim, or a city to claim on behalf of that law enforcement entity, and it’s been a monumental waste of taxpayer dollars,” he said.