To settle a lawsuit brought by a Sag Harbor attorney, the Southampton Town Police Department has agreed to turn over a number of records pertaining to department procedures.
The attorney, Patricia Weiss, filed a Freedom of Information request in December 2021 for the department’s police manual, and her request was denied. She appealed the decision to the town attorney’s office the following month, and the response was the same.
So she sued the town, the town attorney and the Southampton Town Police records access officer in State Supreme Court.
According to the stipulation of settlement, dated May 18 and filed in court on June 29, the town and the police department will provide Weiss with all written policies pertaining to complaint intake procedures, complaint processing, arrest processing, “cross-complainants,” processing and investigating disputes between neighbors, and the process for completing “master incident reports.”
The quotation marks around “cross-complainants” and “master incident reports” are included in the handwritten stipulation.
The stipulation states that the town will provide the records if they exist and do not fall within an exemption to the Freedom of Information Law. If a record does fall under an exemption, the town must provide Weiss with written notice explaining which specific FOIL exemption applies.
In the verified petition that Weiss filed in February, she stated that she requested in December 2021 “a copy of the entire Southampton Town Police Department’s police manual(s) which describes any and all procedures that police officers and/or staff should follow concerning investigations, arrests, processing of complaints, etc.”
She stated that she was contacted via phone by Lieutenant Susan Ralph on January 5 and believes that after their call, Ralph added some words to the original request form.
The initial denial, dated January 12, stated: “This request does not reasonably describe a record for which we can perform a reasonable search. Please further describe request.”
In her appeal sent to Town Attorney James Burke, Weiss wrote, “All towns in New York are supposed to have and maintain an updated manual for their police department.” She also wrote that Ralph’s given reason for denial is “a fabricated, pretextual response that strains credulity.”
Weiss further told Burke that the response to her FOIL request stated that she has the right to appeal within 30 days to the office of the county attorney. “The county attorney is not the correct person to whom this appeal should be directed,” Weiss wrote, underlining “not.”
She also accused Ralph of improperly backdating the response to January 5, while the postmark was January 13. She also pointed out that she provided her email address on the FOIL request form and should have received Ralph’s response electronically — as the Freedom of Information Law requires.
Weiss also argued that there was nothing unreasonable about the description of her request and that the reason for denial was unwarranted.
“It is also inapplicable because it is not an authorized exemption,” she continued. “Copies of all written police department manuals must be provided to me. My use of the word ‘entire’ in the request was a thoughtful inclusion so that the FOIL officer does not need to expend time parsing out what sections of the manual(s) to provide. … She can ask Police Chief Steven E. Skrynecki for his own copy of the Southampton Town Police Department’s police manual, which is probably sitting on a shelf in his private office at police headquarters.”
Skrynecki, in a sworn affidavit dated March 28, explained how it is not as simple as that.
“Petitioner’s assertion that there is a copy of a Southampton Town Police Department police manual sitting on a shelf in my office is incorrect,” his affidavit reads.
According to Skrynecki, the department does not have a complete and comprehensive manual for police, nor a manual containing all of the department’s updated policies. He wrote that department policies and procedures “exist in multiple locations and multiple formats,” though he noted that the department is in the process of updating, compiling and centralizing all policies.
“As the leader of the department, I take conforming to all laws, including FOIL, very seriously and any assertion to the contrary, such as that made in the petition, is meritless,” he concluded.
Ralph, in an affidavit of her own, wrote that she had called Weiss to assist her in obtaining records and that she explained on that call that the department is in the process of creating an updated manual and that the department does not possess records matching Weiss’s request.
“I also gave petitioner an opportunity to update her request by clarifying the items she was seeking,” Ralph wrote, adding that Weiss was “very antagonistic, refused to clarify her request, and insisted that I deny her FOIL request.”
Ralph said she added notes to Weiss’s request form in “an attempt to clarify what she sought.”
In explaining why the postmark date was eight days after the date of the denial, Ralph said that after denying the request, she added it to a pile of other FOIL request responses to be mailed out by a civilian administrative staff member.
Reached by telephone, Weiss said she has no comment on the matter.
