Only 10 days after issuing an opinion on OPRA and police disciplinary information, on June 17 the Supreme Court issued another ruling on law enforcement records and OPRA. The Court held that a police department is required to respond to an OPRA request for electronic information concerning complaints and summonses. Simmons v. Mercado.

The case involved an OPRA request to the Millville Police Department for DWI, drug possession, and drug paraphernalia complaints and summonses. Police departments do not maintain these records; instead, police officers enter arrest-related information into the Judiciary’s Electronic Complaint Disposition Record (eCDR) system, which generates complaints and summonses and is the repository of these records. The Supreme Court opinion notes that police departments have access to the Judiciary’s eCDR system.

The Supreme Court rejected the argument that requests for these records may only be made to the Judiciary, as the custodian of the eCDR system. The Court said that the records were “made” by the department’s police officers when they inputted arrest information, and therefore they are “government records” of the department under OPRA that must be disclosed by the department.

Of course, the police department (or any other agency) cannot disclose a record without having the ability to retrieve that record from somewhere. In this case, the police department has the ability to retrieve the information through its access to the Judiciary’s eCDR system; presumably for this reason, the Court considered both the police department and the Judiciary to be “concurrent” custodians of the electronic information in question.