Police

A local district attorney in Oklahoma has filed a criminal libel complaint against a blogger there -- and police are investigating the case.

With the Olympics underway, reports are streaming in from China this week of foreign journalists being detained, having photos deleted from their cameras and in at least one case getting roughed up by police while they work.

Faced with spreading criticism, the mayor of Buffalo agreed Thursday to restore basic crime details that have vanished from the police computer that reporters use.

A photographer with a Texas newspaper was detained Monday for 45 minutes after he refused to show police his pictures of workers tending to an oil spill, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

Sixteen years after the rape and murder of a University of Georgia student, with no suspects and no fresh leads in the case, the police files can still be considered part of a pending investigation and so withheld from the public, the state Supreme Court has ruled.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals encouraged the state Supreme Court on Tuesday to review whether the Legislature violated the state’s open records law when it approved union contracts that kept state employees’ names from being publicly released.

The higher court will now decide whether to take the case.

A county circuit judge ruled in favor of the newspapers in 2006.

Federal appellate judges in Chicago heard oral arguments Tuesday over whether records containing police misconduct and excessive force complaints should be released to the public.

A freelance journalist and 28 city aldermen want access to documents that name the 662 Chicago police officers with more than 10 complaints filed against them. U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow ordered the release of the sealed misconduct accusations last July, but the city appealed.

Judge Marilyn G. Diamond gave the New York Police Department 60 days to turn over a database of hundreds of thousands of street stops to civil rights advocates.

The database detailed the locations and other details about each stop-and-frisk that has occurred since 2006. The NYPD asked the judge to dismiss the case because the records also divulged personal information about the officers who made each stop.

The New Orleans Police Department and the Times-Picayune have reached an agreement that will require the police department to turn over police incident reports in a more timely manner. 

The public has the right to known the names of police officers who were involved in critical incidents, though there may be situations in which officers’ safety concerns or the integrity of the case outweigh this presumption of openness, according to an opinion released Tuesday by California Attorney General Jerry Brown.