Public records and data can add multitudes to a story, but they’re not always easy to access.

For Sunshine Week back in 2016, I wrote about the challenges that crop up when you’re trying to get public records in Mississippi. For instance, a police department sent me a $1,400 invoice for records, then agreed to drop the cost to about $800. They contested an ethics complaint I filed claiming I was overcharged, but they made a mistake. In their response to my complaint, they labeled by hand the “actual cost” to produce the records, which turned out to be $1,140 less than what they’d initially charged us.

Like many of my peers in Oklahoma, I’ve run into the occasional brick wall here, as well. The open records law here doesn’t give state or local public bodies a deadline to provide requested documents. In theory, agencies should give records to anyone who requested them in a reasonable time, ideally a few weeks or so, but in practice, they can get away with delaying indefinitely. Records can take months to arrive, sometimes longer than that, and reporters and other members of the public have no recourse.

That reality doesn’t lessen the importance of pursuing public records, especially during a time when the truth is at a premium. Access to public information is an important sign of a healthy level of government transparency, and it’s part of our job as journalists to note when that access is limited.

Here are a few of my stories that I couldn’t have done without data or public records:

• This story led the Amarillo Police Department to analyze its backlog of untested rape kits, which at the time was one of the largest of its kind in Texas.
• The Mississippi Department of Education awarded massive contracts to the state superintendent’s former co-workers.
• An MDE administrator earned a full-time, six-figure salary while moonlighting as an out-of-state consultant.
• Rural landowners in Mississippi claimed AT&T and its subcontractors laid fiber optic cables on their property without permission.