Opinion ID: 2959659
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Gender, Race, and Date Redactions

Text: We turn now to the FOP’s challenge to the Superior Court’s determination that the MPD’s redaction of references to gender, race, and event date were proper under FOIA’s exemption for information “of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”14 “The term ‘unwarranted’ requires us to ‘balance the public interest in disclosure against the privacy interest Congress [and the Council of the District of 13 The FOP charges that the Superior Court acknowledged during the status hearings that the District’s first production contained redaction errors, yet allowed those errors to go uncorrected. That is not how we read the record. To the contrary, the District agreed to correct certain mistaken redactions identified during the first status hearing, and the parties ultimately reported to the court that they had conferred and resolved some of their disagreements. In the end, the court reviewed all the remaining redactions in camera and found them proper. 14 D.C. Code § 2-534 (a)(2). 15 Columbia] intended the exemption to protect.’”15 Because FOIA mandates disclosure unless a privacy interest is implicated, our initial inquiry under this exemption is “whether there is any privacy interest at stake in the information sought.”16 The privacy interest that is entitled to protection “encompasses the individual’s control of information concerning his or her person, including names, addresses, and other identifying information.”17 “Moreover, individuals have a privacy interest in personal information even if it is not of an embarrassing or intimate nature.”18 While disclosures of personal information may amount to only de minimis invasions of privacy when the identities of the individuals involved are withheld, “the privacy interest that would be compromised by linking the personal information to particular, named individuals is greater than de minimis.”19 15 FOP 2013, 75 A.3d at 265 (quoting Padou v. District of Columbia, 29 A.3d 973, 982 (D.C. 2011)). 16 Id. 17 Id. at 265–66 (internal quotation marks omitted). 18 Id. at 266. 19 Id. at 267 (citing U.S. Dep’t of State v. Ray, 502 U.S. 164, 176 (1991)). 16 If the court finds that a “more than de minimis” interest in the privacy of personal information is implicated, the burden shifts to the requester to demonstrate that disclosure of the withheld information would advance a significant public interest, and that the public interest in disclosure outweighs the privacy concern.20 “Otherwise, the invasion of privacy is unwarranted.”21 “The only relevant ‘public interest in disclosure’ to be weighed in this balance is the extent to which disclosure would serve the ‘core purpose of the FOIA,’ which is ‘contributing significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government.’”22 Thus, to overcome the privacy interest at stake, the requestor must show at a minimum that the withheld information will “shed light on an agency’s performance of its statutory duties or otherwise let citizens know what their government is up to.”23 For the purposes of the balancing required under FOIA, there is no cognizable public interest in “information about private citizens 20 Id. at 265; see Nat’l Archives & Records Admin. v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157, 172 (2004); U.S. Dep’t of Defense v. Fed. Labor Rel’ns Auth., 510 U.S. 487, 49597 (1994). 21 Favish, 541 U.S. at 172. 22 U.S. Dep’t of Defense v. Fed. Labor Rel’ns Auth., 510 U.S. at 495 (quoting U.S. Dep’t of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, 775 (1989)) (emphasis in the original). 23 FOP 2013, 75 A.3d at 266 (quoting U.S. Dep’t of Defense v. Fed. Labor Rel’ns Auth., 510 U.S. at 497). 17 that is accumulated in various governmental files but that reveals little or nothing about an agency’s own conduct.”24 In the present case, there is no dispute that police officers subject to departmental disciplinary proceedings have far more than a de minimis privacy interest in not being publicly identified. The propriety of redactions reasonably necessary to ensure their anonymity is not in doubt. “[E]ven with names redacted,” the disclosure of other personal information may result in an invasion of their privacy because individuals “can often be identified through other, disclosed information” and the “later recognition of identifying details.”25 The FOP argues only that disclosure of gender, race, and related event dates does not implicate the officers’ privacy interest here, “because it cannot lead to the identification of the subject officer.”26 This argument is categorical in nature; it is not based on the FOP’s contextual analysis of each (or any) challenged redaction to assess whether the withheld information might help it identify the subject officer. On the contrary, the FOP contends that “[a] redaction-by-redaction analysis was not (and is not 24 Reporters Comm., 489 U.S. at 773. 25 Id. at 769. 26 Reply Br. for Appellant 9 (emphasis added). 18 now) necessary to determine whether it is proper under the D.C. FOIA for the District to redact the race and gender designations and the event dates contained in the subject disciplinary files.”27 That is so, the FOP asserts, because “there is no circumstance, and certainly not one that is more probable than a remote possibility, in which disclosure of race or gender [or event date] would identify a particular officer in a 3,915-member police force with 915 female officers, 279 Hispanic officers, and 63 Asian officers.”28 This assertion did not persuade the Superior Court, and it does not persuade us. In the first place, the size and composition of the police force as a whole are irrelevant, because the information that the FOP sought and received was restricted to a small subset of that force, its lieutenants, captains, and other high ranking officers.29 And second, as the Superior Court rightly appreciated, “what constitutes 27 Id. at 5. Consistent with this position, the FOP does not contend that the Superior Court abused its discretion by not reviewing the redactions in camera, and we do not perceive any basis for such a contention. See generally Carter v. U.S. Dep’t of Commerce, 830 F.2d 388, 392-93 (D.C. Cir. 1987). 28 Reply Br. for Appellant 12–13. The FOP relies on published statistics in the MPD’s 2007 Annual Report, which are cited by the District in its brief on appeal. In the Superior Court, the FOP relied primarily on the fact that the Metropolitan Police Force had approximately 4,000 members at the relevant times. 29 In 2007, according to other data from the MPD’s Annual Report that the District cites in its brief, there were 163 lieutenants, 45 captains, and 37 other (continued…) 19 identifying information regarding a subject . . . must be weighed not only from the viewpoint of the public, but also from the vantage of” the FOP’s members who would have been familiar with the MPD’s operations and personnel.30 Given the particularization of the FOP’s individual FOIA requests and with the information disclosed in the files, including the details of the disciplinary infraction, the year (or narrower time frame) in which the infraction occurred, and various other facts, FOP members interested in identifying the subject of the disciplinary proceedings and familiar with the Police Department would have little difficulty winnowing down the possibilities to only a few candidates. It is quite plausible that, in many cases, the additional clues provided by the officer’s gender or race or the specific date of a key event would enable such a curious and well-informed reader to eliminate all but one of those possible suspects. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, or of bad faith on the part of the MPD, its considered judgment on this score is entitled to respect.31 Thus, the FOP’s mere assertion to the contrary (continued…) command personnel (including inspectors, commanders, assistant chiefs, and the Chief of Police). The FOP has not questioned these figures. 30 Dep’t of the Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 380 (1976). 31 See Carter, 830 F.2d at 391 (holding that “[i]n the absence of any conflicting evidence,” the court will “give some credence to the agency’s familiarity” with the subject matter in evaluating its determination that releasing certain information “would lead to identification”); cf. Hines, 567 A.2d at 913–14 (continued…) 20 fails to persuade us that the Superior Court erred in finding that a more than trivial privacy interest was implicated by the redacted gender, race, and date information.32 This privacy interest was not outweighed by any public interest favoring disclosure that the FOP identified. The FOP’s interest in using the withheld information to educate and defend police officers facing disciplinary action is a private interest of the FOP and its members, not a public interest as that term is (continued…) (noting that it is the “duty of the agency to identify reasonably segregable portions of records which must be produced”). 32 The FOP argues that the invalidity of the redactions is shown by the MPD’s inconsistent approach to making them. We disagree. That the MPD took a discriminating approach in deciding whether to redact references to gender, race, and event dates, rather than excising all such references across the board, is only to be applauded; we see nothing suspect about the MPD’s judgment that such references were identifying in some but not all cases. The FOP also argues that the Superior Court erred by starting from the premise that the personal privacy exemption is “broader” than other FOIA exemptions. See note 6, supra. Whatever this comment meant, however, we see no reason to think that any misconception as to the scope of the personal privacy exemption led the court astray in its determination that the redactions implicated a more than de minimis privacy interest, in balancing that interest against the putative public interests advanced by the FOP, or in any other respect. 21 used in FOIA litigation.33 The public does have an interest in the disclosure of disparate treatment based on gender or race in the MPD’s disciplinary proceedings. But when there is a protected privacy interest and the asserted public interest is the discovery of governmental misconduct, “the requester must establish more than a bare suspicion in order to obtain disclosure. Rather, the requester must produce evidence that would warrant a belief by a reasonable person that the alleged Government impropriety might have occurred.”34 The FOP produced no evidence of inconsistent discipline by the MPD based on gender or race, and the record is devoid of such evidence. “The speculative nature of FOP’s asserted hypothetical public interest is simply insufficient for us to give it weight as a public interest.”35 33 See U.S. Dep’t of Defense v. Fed. Labor Rel’ns Auth., 510 U.S. at 497– 500 (explaining that a union’s interest in obtaining information to enhance its collective bargaining activities and member relations is not a public interest in disclosure for purposes of FOIA’s balancing analysis because it is outside the ambit of the public interest FOIA was enacted to serve); Carter, 830 F.2d at 390 n.8 (interest in defending target of disciplinary investigation not a public interest); Tereshchuk v. Bureau of Prisons, 67 F. Supp. 3d 441, 451 (D.D.C. 2014), aff’d 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 11150 (D.C. Cir. June 29, 2015) (prisoner’s interest in challenging the loss of his good time not a public interest). 34 Favish, 541 U.S. at 174; accord FOP 2013, 75 A.3d at 268. 35 FOP 2013, 75 A.3d at 268. 22