After my visit to Howard Fezell’s website, I decided to cruise some Black Conservative websites. They have a WEALTH of data useful to RKBA. Thank you, HOWARD! Anyway, this bit on the DOJ is one I found very unsettling. BTW- Wasn’t the Dept of Justice mentioned as one of the sources for Howard’s “Blacks commit more crimes” stats? Hmmm……..

Justice Department Accused of Withholding Criminal Data
By Scott Hogenson
CNS Executive Editor
20 July, 2000

(CNSNews.com) – The US Department of Justice is withholding data on nearly half of all federal law enforcement actions and prosecutions during recent years, prompting accusations that the department has “thwarted public access” to the statistical records of federal agencies and made it impossible to “assess the accuracy” of Clinton Administration claims of reduced crime, according to a lawsuit by a major university research center.

The department is also accused of having “repeatedly reneged” on promises to provide certain computer files on federal criminal enforcement actions, which could have an impact on the upcoming elections by preventing comparisons of the Clinton Administration’s record with prior years.

The charges are among those related to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering, research and distribution organization at Syracuse University in New York that has compiled statistics on federal law enforcement activities since 1989.

Information compiled by TRAC has been used in the past to dispute the need for more gun control laws by showing declines in prosecuting firearm offenses, illustrate trends showing more tax audits of poor people than rich, demonstrate a drop in pornography prosecutions since 1993 and otherwise gauge the criminal justice record of the Clinton Administration.

The Justice Department’s refusal to release the data “allows them, in this instance, to withhold a great deal of information about their activities,” said Michael Tankersley, senior staff attorney for the Public Citizen Litigation Group, a Washington, DC-based legal organization that is representing TRAC in its lawsuit.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to answer questions citing the nature of the pending litigation, but the trail of correspondence between the department and TRAC shows a series of delays in releasing data and responding to requests for action by the department, as well as the withholding of significant amounts of data on the federal government’s law enforcement activities for much of President Clinton’s second term in office.

Questions on the Reliability of DoJ Data

TRAC compiles criminal justice data for the purpose of providing “the American people – and institutions of oversight such as Congress, news organizations, public interest groups, businesses, scholars and lawyers – with comprehensive information about the activities of federal enforcement and regulatory agencies,” according to the group’s Internet web site.

The information compiled by TRAC covers the activities of 90 US Attorneys offices in the 50 states but excludes data from the four US Attorneys offices located in US territories. The records include the enforcement activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the US Customs Service.

Neither officials with TRAC nor their attorney would speculate on why the Justice Department is refusing to release more information on federal cases, but the amount of data withheld appears to be significant. “They have deleted half the records, they just haven’t explained the criteria,” said Dr. Susan Long, the co-director of TRAC and a professor of quantitative methods at Syracuse University’s School of Management. “We have questions regarding the reliability of the data.”

As recently as July 6, Long and David Burnham, TRAC’s co-director in the center’s Washington, DC office, asked the Justice Department to explain the criteria used in deciding which data would be released and which would be withheld.

In that request, Long and Burnham note that the Justice Department actions could have political implications. Referring to the partial data as “haphazard slices” of information, Long and Burnham said failure to make more information available makes it difficult to verify “claims which have been made by the administration, members of Congress, and others participating in this year’s political debates.”

The issue of crime routinely surfaces as a perennial campaign issue in many races, and Long and Burnham said the partial release of data means “there is no way these files can be used to compare the federal government’s fiscal year 1999 enforcement record with prior years.”

Delays, Broken Promises and Changing the Rules

The current FOIA dispute is only the latest in an ongoing battle between TRAC and the Justice Department, according to Tankersley. The research center filed suit against the department in US District Court in Syracuse, New York in 1998 seeking specific records from federal cases in Kentucky and Minnesota.

Tankersley said that case was settled in June 1999, when the department’s Executive Office for United States Attorneys agreed to release the requested criminal case management data to TRAC rather than go to court.

In a June 18, 1999 letter to TRAC’s lawyer, then-EOUSA Director Donna A. Bucella wrote that in response to future data requests, “we intend to release the fields agreed upon in the subject lawsuit as the appropriate ones under FOIA, absent unforeseen complications, errors or changes,” according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by CNSNews.com.

Bucella also promised, “to confer with TRAC on procedures for format, media and redaction of withheld fields,” but Long said the Justice Department has failed to follow through on that pledge. “They’re not doing that,” said Long.

According to Long, Justice Department officials “have conferred with us about format and media,” but she said that when it came to the withholding of information, “they told us what they were going to do, they did not confer. That was a change from what had been agreed upon in that letter.”

The Justice Department’s refusal to release certain data to TRAC also represented a departure from the June 1999 agreement. “They tried to stiff us,” said Burnham, who’s also an associate research professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a former investigative reporter for The New York Times. “They kept diddling with us and diddling with us and diddling with us,” said Burnham.

The delays continued until the autumn of 1999 when, according to Tankersley, Justice Department officials promised in October that databases reaching as far back as 1974 would be released. That promise was repeated in January 2000, when the department informed TRAC that data for 1997 was being compiled and that other statistics dating back to 1992 would be ready within 60 days, with information from 1974-1991 coming later in the year.

But TRAC’s expectations of receiving the data were dealt a blow in March when Suzanne Little, the assistant director of the Freedom of Information Act Division of the Justice Department’s EOUSA, informed TRAC that the data would be delayed for another two and a half months pending new “redaction guidelines” governing the release of certain information.

In a March 24 letter to TRAC’s Dr. Long, Little wrote “it was anticipated that the requested data would be redacted in accordance with the format utilized to produce the Central year-end data for 1998. However, that will no longer be the case.”

Little’s letter did not specify why new guidelines for withholding data were necessary, but it did state “new redaction guidelines are in the process of being finalized and will be provided to you when completed,” according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by CNSNews.com. The one-page letter indicated a delay of “approximately two and half months” (sic) due to the creation and testing of a new redaction program.

Earlier delays prompted the filing of another FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department in February, this time in the US District Court in Washington, DC. The February suit was amended in April after TRAC learned that the department was changing the rules by which statistical data could be released under the Freedom of Information Act, according to Tankersley.

The same month the Washington, DC FOIA suit was amended, Tankersley sought a meeting with Justice Department officials to discuss the release of the material in question, noting in his correspondence to EOUSA Director Mary H. Murguia that the department’s actions do not “reflect good faith or a cooperative effort to make records available to the public.”

A Significant Volume of Missing Data

Tankersley got the meeting he requested, but not the outcome he wanted. In a 20 minute meeting with three Justice Department officials on May 3, Tankersley said he was told that the department would not abide by the terms of the settlement of the 1998 Syracuse FOIA lawsuit. “They formally said they were not going to follow (the Syracuse) agreement,” Tankersley said. “They said they changed their mind.”

Later that month, Little informed TRAC that the department would provide the data, but withhold information on cases involving fugitives, juveniles and defendants in pretrial diversion programs. However, Long and Burnham said they believe the Justice Department is withholding far more information that is not related to those three categories.

After the delivery of two batches of computerized data to TRAC on May 23 and June 1, Long and Burnham noted that “49% of the entries in the FY 1995 Criminal Master file are missing in their entirety,” according to the pair’s July 6 correspondence to Little. The letter went on to claim “47% of the entries are missing from the FY 1996 and 1997 files,” and that about one-third of the entries were missing from the 1999 Criminal Master and Criminal Charge files handed over to TRAC.

“They’re withholding entire cases,” said Tankersley, who noted that the past practice was for the Justice Department “to release all of the cases, but to withhold the identifying information,” that could link an individual to a particular case.

Not only were entire cases withheld, but Long and Burnham said it’s impossible to tell how many cases were held back. Normally, redacted information is indicated in such reports by asterisks, which indicate that a particular piece of information has been left out of the report. But the two TRAC co-directors noted in their July 6 letter to Little that the Justice Department “eliminated any trace of the entry so that it is not possible for us to determine how many entries were withheld.”

The criminal justice data collected by TRAC has been used in the past to substantiate a number of policy positions that have proved politically troublesome for the Clinton Administration.

According to Burnham, data regarding ATF’s prosecution of gun-related crimes was culled from TRAC databases and used by the National Rifle Association to bolster its position that gun violence in American would be better curbed by improved law enforcement rather than the creation of new gun control laws.

Also found in the minutia of the data was information showing that the Internal Revenue Service had a tendency to audit low-income taxpayers more often than high-income taxpayers, bringing further scrutiny on the IRS.

Burnham said that the decision by the Justice Department to withhold such large amounts of data prohibits similar analysis of other law enforcement matters. “The bottom line here is they provided us with FY 1999 data about a month ago where they had deleted about 50% of the records without fully explaining why,” said Burnham. “What that means is that it is impossible, in the statistical sense, to compare the performance of the FBI or the DEA or other federal agencies with previous years.”

Dr. Susan Long, Burnham’s TRAC counterpart in Syracuse, underscored the point by illustrating the importance of lifting the cloak of secrecy from data that can demonstrate the federal government’s record on crime. “If you want to understand what your government does, you need to have information,” said Long.