Cop Secret

In a February 27 letter to the paper, Shaw maintained that the statute requiring that citizens be allowed to inspect records doesn't apply to the Riverfront Times, though she didn't explain her reasoning.

Of course, it's tough to ask the police to arrest themselves. Indeed, even talking to department officials about anything is difficult. The department's media-relations division has stopped speaking to the RFT, referring all inquiries about public records to Shaw in the legal division. Shaw also refuses to speak directly to the newspaper. When the paper asked for an interview, the woman who answered the phone said the department has a new policy: All interactions between the media and the department's legal division must be in writing.

Life is apparently much easier for the city's daily newspaper. "With a reporter assigned to the St. Louis Police Department every day, we regularly obtain access to records on request at no charge," says Richard Weil, an assistant managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "If it's something for which the department chooses to require a formally worded freedom-of-information request, we go through that process. In recent experience, we have paid as little as nothing or as much as $125 to compensate for copying costs."