The Supreme Court announced today that it will review the requestor’s appeal in North Jersey Media v. Lyndhurst, in which the Appellate Division determined that almost every record connected with a criminal investigation is confidential under OPRA.

As I’ve previously noted, the Lyndhurst matter is a seminal case. The Supreme Court has never before reviewed OPRA’s exemption for criminal investigatory records.

Press articles about the case (including this one authored by the attorney for the requestor) have focused on one aspect, the holding that police motor vehicle recordings are covered by OPRA’s criminal investigatory records exemption. But it’s important to understand that the case actually involves many other critical law enforcement records, including CAD reports, log book notations, vehicle logs, activity logs, daily statistical sheets, daily bulletins, and all other police reports, such as incident reports, operations reports and investigation reports–in short, all of the records that are routinely part of an investigation.