Last year, the Louisville Courier Journal filed an open records request with the Louisville, Kentucky, Metro police for all records regarding the sexual abuse of minors in the department’s Explorers program by officers. The department said it did not have those records—they’d been turned over to the police. The newspaper appealed that decision, and now the department admits it did have those records, 738,000 of them, but allowed them to expire from its backup system after handing them over to the FBI. An attorney for the department insists it did not actually destroy any records because the FBI does have copies. But the newspaper’s attorney says the department’s move effectively makes it impossible for the media to obtain the records through state open records law.
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