Perry school shooting report is still not available to public

The fatal school shootings in Perry in early January took place eight months ago. The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) has concluded its investigation of the tragic incident and turned it over to Dallas County Attorney Jeannine Ritchie. Ritchie refuses to make the report’s findings public. That choice deprives Perry school students, their families, school staff members, and Perry’s residents of information they want to know about the event.

Perry residents have a right to learn what circumstances surrounded the ability of a Perry student to bring a gun to school in the morning, hide out with it in a restroom, and then during school breakfast enter the cafeteria and begin firing, killing two and wounding several more.

If school personnel made mistakes relating to security, those errors need to be made public so safety can improve. Likewise if a school security lapse was not a factor, people need to learn that too. If the DCI found possible causes for the actions of the shooter, who took his own life after the killings, Perry residents need to know what they were. How the killer obtained the weapon needs to come to light as well. Other questions have been on the minds of Perry residents for many months.

County Attorney Ritchie rightly notes that Iowa law allows official reports of criminal investigations to be kept confidential. Chapter 22 is the portion of the Iowa Code which governs public records. Section 22.7 of that chapter begins as follows:

“The following public records shall be kept confidential, unless otherwise ordered by a court, by the lawful custodian of the records, or by another person duly authorized to release such information:”

Then Subsection 5 of Section 22.7, one of the 75 exemptions to public records disclosure, begins as follows: “Peace officers’ investigative reports, privileged records . . . , and specific portions of electronic mail and telephone billing records of the law enforcement agencies if that information is part of an ongoing investigation, except where disclosure is authorized elsewhere in this Code. However, the date, time, specific location and immediate facts and circumstances surrounding a crime or incident shall not be kept confidential under this section, except in those unusual circumstances where disclosure would plainly and seriously jeopardize an investigation or pose a clear and present danger to the safety of an individual.”

I suppose an argument could be made that what Perry residents want to know might fall under the classification of “immediate facts and circumstances surrounding a crime or incident,” thereby requiring that some of those questions must be answered. But I don’t want to argue one side or another of that proposition.

For me, the key words of the opening of Section 22.7 are the important ones: the investigative report is confidential “unless otherwise ordered . . . by the lawful custodian of the records . . .”. County Attorney Ritchie is now the lawful custodian of the DCI report once the state agency turned the report over to her. If she chose to do so she could make the report public, or at least its basic important facts.

In other words, Ritchie is not required to keep the report confidential. To do so is her own choice, not a requirement of the law.

Eight months would seem enough time to close the criminal investigation, especially since the perpetrator took his own life. The event is not an ongoing one.

But if County Attorney Ritchie and peace officers in Perry or the state are of the opinion that someone else may have been involved leading up to the killings, there would be a logical reason to keep the investigation report confidential. Releasing it under those circumstances could jeopardize the ongoing search for leads and evidence.

The Des Moines Register reported in its September 6 story that Ritchie said the investigative record is part of an ongoing probe. Until that situation is resolved, there’s no way to know whether continued confidentiality of the report is warranted. The public is not In a position to make that decision.

However, in many other states the conclusions of shooting investigations similar to the tragic event in Perry were released long before eight months had elapsed.

It’s time to bring Iowa law into line with the codes of those other states, which require that investigative reports become open to the public once an investigation is finalized.

I asked Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn how he treats investigative reports. He responded that once the investigation is closed, he authorizes release of the official report, reserving the right to redact facts that could endanger specific persons or identify them as sources of some of the investigative narrative.

Unless investigation of the Perry incident continues as an active one, Dallas County Attorney Ritchie should treat the report the way Laehn would.

And there’s no reason Iowa law should allow investigative reports to be kept confidential after the case is closed. The public has a right to know those facts just as much as peace officers and legal system officials do.