As you may recall, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the District of Columbia’s Department of Motor Vehicles last November after receiving two photo-generated speeding violations on the same stretch of road in DC. I wanted to find out if the Metro police were targeting out of state drivers since at that time I still had a West Virginia license plate. In the process of investigating my violations, I learned that even though a draft ticket is automatically prepared by the private company whose software takes a photo of cars going over the 30 mile per hour speed limit on the 1400 block of Bladensburg Road, it is the Metro police who decides whether the ticket will be prosecuted. So that made me wonder whether there was any bias in the way police issued those tickets.
I think it is clear by now that our local Department of Motor Vehicles has something to hide because not only did they immediately refuse my FOIA request for very specious reasons, as I outlined in my previous blog, but when I appealed the decision to the Mayor’s office, they also rebuffed my appeal — after making me wait for almost five months. The arguments the Mayor’s legal team lay out in their final decision are, I have to say, pretty dumb. In their letter to me, the Mayor’s office of legal counsel (no specific lawyer’s name is supplied), write that ” this Office is inclined to accept DMV’s representation that it does not have—absent the creation of the same—a record detailing the information you seek.” What they neglect to mention is that it would be very easy for the private software company that handles the automatic traffic enforcement system to write code to create a record of all the cars that were ticketed for going over the speed limit on the 1400 block of Bladensburg Road last September. Now according to a strict reading of DC’s public records act, they don’t have to create that record. But surely the Metropolitan police have a record of all the cars that were actually sent tickets; it stands to reason they would have to, if only to protect themselves in case someone appeals their ticket or sues them. So why don’t they want to release this information? Probably because it would show the kind of out of state bias that I suspect. And it would open the DMV up to all kinds of lawsuits. So much easier to just use nonsensical legalese to deny a FOIA.
The Mayor’s office did leave open the possibility that I can resubmit my FOIA request with more specifics, but I’m not sure how much more specific I can get than I already did in my original FOIA request and appeals process. I may indeed do that just to see what kind of legal contortions the DMV lawyers jump through this time in their efforts to deny me what should be readily available public information. I’ll keep you posted.
