SHERIFF WARREN RUPF From the law enforcement community: Records survey was a waste of public time ON DEC. 4, a man whom we later learned to be Roman Gokhman, a reporter with the Tri-Valley Herald, dropped off a two-page Public Records Act (PRA) request at the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department reception desk. In your article on our response to this PRA request, you state, "Twenty-four days after receiving written request, sheriff's department refers requester to other county departments." While that timeline comports with our view of this transaction, the statute provides for a response in 10 days plus a 14-day extension. We advised Gokhman on Dec. 8, four days after receiving his request, that we required this extended time, until Dec. 28. He responded, by e-mail, "The extension is all right." We delivered our response to Gokhman on the very day we promised, entirely consistent with the statute. Regarding the allegation that we referred the requester to other county departments, on only one of his 12 requests was he referred to another county department, and in so doing we assisted him in obtaining documents that are not in the possession or control of the Office of the Sheriff. On Dec. 28, Gokhman was sent our response in the form of a three-page, single-spaced letter delivered to him by e-mail. The letter identified the many documents we had gathered for him. Gokhman, however, had no interest in viewing the documents. It was all a test. More than 25 days after our response was e-mailed to Gokhman, the documents that we collected for him sit in an unviewed pile gathering dust. He had appointed himself an "auditor" and determined that he would require the substantial expenditure of public funds for the private benefit of participating in the creation of a newspaper article. On Jan. 12, the article reporting on the response to his and his colleagues' PRA requests was trumpeted on the front page of the Times. Reading the article, we learned that similar PRA requests had been made at "more than 200 departments and California Highway Patrol offices, including 63 in the Bay Area." What a colossal expenditure of public funds by these self-appointed "auditors"! These were not auditors and this was not an audit. Rather, this was a private, covert plan to cause 200 police departments and sheriff's offices to waste their time. During the course of this futile exercise, we heard from the chief of a local department who lamented that he had two homicide investigations in progress and a missing child to locate, and he had to pull people off those duties to respond to this Public Records Act request. Had he only known then that the requester had no interest in seeing the documents but only wanted the chief's department to spin its wheels. Gokhman's request required a substantial expenditure of time and effort by at least six members of my staff, in different divisions and different bureaus, to locate and copy many documents. Other county employees, in the Auditor-Controller's Office and in the County Counsel's Office, were also involved in the effort to satisfy Gokhman's request. We receive and handle PRA requests frequently. Typically, an individual or an organization makes a request for a document or for records pertaining to an incident or relating to departmental policy or procedure. Our staff strives to respond consistent with all laws and good manners, and I am convinced that they met or exceeded both standards in this case. They deserve a better "grade." Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is your report that this "effort was coordinated by Californians Aware, a Sacramento-based group that advocates for transparent government and records access." Unstated in the article is that Californians Aware has a decidedly anti-police bent. The readers of the Times deserve better efforts. Although we support the reporting of poor or illegal performance by government, the basis for your article was entirely faulty. Perhaps we should unilaterally declare ourselves auditors and advise you that you have failed our reporting audit. Your article did not well serve the reputation of the Times. Rupf is sheriff of Contra Costa County. This guest commentary first appeared in the Contra Costa Times on January 28, 2007.    Calaware Response Sheriff Warren Rupf’s January 27 letter, headed in the Times as “Records Survey was a waste of time,” contains several misleading statements. A related commentary by Lisa L. Lorton, president of the California Law Enforcement Records Supervisors (CLEARS), published the same day and headed “From law enforcement community: Departments were setup for failure,” is so riddled with factual misstatements that we have corrected them on our website at http://www.calaware.org rather seek response space here. As for Sheriff Rupf, he is as entitled to his opinion as anyone else, but readers should be aware of the context before joining him in them. First, audits of government agencies’ performance in providing access to public information are nothing new or unique to the Times or Contra Costa County. They have been done in a fair number of states in the past 10 or 15 years, in several areas of California in the past five or so years (including the Times’s own audit of a variety of public agencies just three years ago), and by us—Californians Aware—twice elsewhere before this one. We are, as the Sheriff notes, self-appointed as auditors, because no government has ever considered it a high priority regularly to examine its own openness to the citizens it serves. But as for what he calls our “decidedly anti-police bent,” the Sheriff must know something we don’t. Our previous audits covered a wide variety of public agencies in Fresno County in the summer of 2005 and, earlier last year, 31 state agencies in Sacramento and San Francisco. As a result of the latter, the Governor ordered all executive branch agencies to appoint and train a records access official, and almost 200 agency representatives attended our own free training session several months later. We will be auditing different types of local agencies in the future. This audit has prompted a predictable volume of complaints from chiefs and sheriffs about our methods and standards, but also an apparently equal (at least) level of resolve to do some refresher training for the responsible records personnel. We are volunteering our help for those departments that would like it, and have already scheduled such an on-site session—at travel cost—at the request of a Southern California Department that scored near the very bottom of the audit. The 24 days that Sheriff Rupf’s department took to respond to the written request for access to 10 items was the maximum permitted by law. The auditor asked that items be made available piecemeal, as soon as they were determined to be public, but a lieutenant rejected that approach, indicating that all responses would be held until the final day, more than three weeks after the written request had been submitted. Another organization has complained of the burden on the agency’s lawyers to respond to requests for the 10 items. Our reaction was that if it took a government lawyer more than 60 minutes to do the factual and legal research needed to tell the requester which information would be supplied and which would not—all that’s required within those 28 days—then that lawyer should not be handling public records requests. The request letter itself provided specific legal citations to the code sections mandating access to the three most rarely requested records. As for the Sheriff’s reference to a nearby police chief “who lamented that he had two homicide investigations in progress and a missing child to locate, and he had to pull people off those duties to respond to this Public Records Act request,” I can understand why the chief went unnamed. If he really did divert investigators from their priority duties and reassign them to perform such legal/clerical tasks, his management judgment is open to serious question. Relatively small departments like Dixon, Paso Robles and San Rafael scored in the A range without taking sworn officers off their cases. Those who would like more detail on our audit, why it was done and what it discovered, can find it at http://www.calaware.org/audits.