"When Burwell’s neighbor, Bob McKaig, a retired New Jersey police officer, tried to tell the officers Burwell owned the home and had a medical condition, the officers threatened to arrest him for interfering in their work"
"ACLU seeks records in Vt. racial profiling case; Man handcuffed in his own home" by Dave Gram, Associated Press | August 3, 2010
MONTPELIER, Vt. — It’s a case that is raising questions about racial profiling by police, whether a town is improperly hiding what should be public records, and whether cash-strapped media outlets should take free legal help from a group that frequently takes sides in issues they cover....
And what are all those advertisements I see in my agenda-pushing paper?
In this case, the trouble began May 29, when a cleaning firm employee called police in Hartford to report that a condo she had been hired to clean appeared to have been ransacked and burglarized.
According to The Valley News of West Lebanon, N.H., officers went to the condo in the town’s Wilder section and found a naked black man in a third-floor bathroom. Police sprayed the man with pepper spray, hit him with a baton, handcuffed him, wrapped him in a blanket, and pulled him outside.
The man, Wayne Burwell, was the home’s owner. He has a medical condition involving low blood sugar that made him dazed and disoriented.
When Burwell’s neighbor, Bob McKaig, a retired New Jersey police officer, tried to tell the officers Burwell owned the home and had a medical condition, the officers threatened to arrest him for interfering in their work, the paper reported....
The Valley News and the website vtdigger.org, an investigative journalism website, asked the town of Hartford for a tape of the 911 call that triggered the incident, as well as the police report and the names of responding officers. The town refused, saying it had turned over the matter to State Police and the state attorney general’s office.
The records were related to a matter under investigation, so they were exempt from the public records law, the town said.
“We’re not necessarily saying we’re not giving them out; we’re just saying we’re not giving them out right now,’’ town manager Hunter Rieseberg, told the Associated Press yesterday.
The state’s public records law exempts materials related to an investigation from disclosure, but there is an exception, “records reflecting the initial arrest of a person’’ are public, Allen Gilbert, executive director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday.
The town maintains there was no arrest; it was a case of “temporary custody,’’ Rieseberg said.
Anne Galloway, editor of vtdigger.org, could not afford to hire a lawyer, so the ACLU stepped in to help.
The Valley News declined the help, saying the paper often covered the ACLU and feared that accepting assistance “might compromise people’s perception of our objectivity.’’
So that was a big to-do about nothing, huh?
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