The Indiana attorney general is throwing his weight behind ESPN in the network's public access fight with the University of Notre Dame.
In an amicus, or "friend of the court," brief filed Thursday with the Indiana Court of Appeals, Attorney General Greg Zoeller argues that the university's security police department incident reports are public records.
"The state takes the legal position that transparency is needed in the exercise of police power in order to maintain the public's trust," Zoeller said in a press release. "Disclosing that a possible crime occurred and conveying basic pertinent information helps inform and protect the public and creates more transparency and accountability within the criminal justice system."
Echoing rationale that ESPN argued before St. Joseph County Superior Court Judge Steven Hostetler, Zoeller's 26-page brief emphasizes that all of Notre Dame's university records are not public, since it is a private institution. But the small subset of police incident reports and logs are public, since the officers carry out core state government police powers.
"A police officer is perhaps the quintessential public employee, cloaked in the authority of the state to investigate, detain, arrest, incarcerate, carry and discharge a firearm, and generally maintain the safety of the citizenry," Zoeller's brief states. "The notion that a police department exercising these core state powers can be shielded from public scrutiny by dint of its affiliation with a private university is antithetical to the important policy interests underlying the Access to Public Records Act."
Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt, disagreeing with the positions taken by his predecessors, has issued two non-binding advisory opinions finding the incident reports and logs kept by the campus security police department are public records.