VIDEO: Miami-Dade citizens harassed for making a “public records request”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhmO0g7mc0M[/youtube]
Hat tip to Jack Furnari from BizPac Review for this report. Furnari states, “In the [below] video, a group of political gadflies walk into Hialeah City Hall and make a simple public records request while filming themselves, and they are harassed every step of the way, in violation of state law.”
Florida statute 119.07, Inspection and copying of records, reads, “Every person who has custody of a public record shall permit the record to be inspected and copied by any person desiring to do so, at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions, and under supervision by the custodian of the public records.”
Carlos Miller, who was part of the group making the public records request, writes on PINAC, ” Florida has perhaps the most liberal public records laws in the United States, but you wouldn’t know that by making simple requests to the government officials in charge of those records. And you especially wouldn’t know that in Hialeah, a Miami-Dade municipality that has a long history of corruption, despite its ‘City of Progress’ nickname.”
“That’s where we ended up getting detained by police on Tuesday because, in their words, we had ‘invaded’ the city clerk’s office and ‘attacked’ them with our cameras, putting them ‘under threat’ and causing them to feel ‘intimidated’,” reports Miller.
Furnari notes, “The most outrageous part of this video happens when the gadflies leave the building and the police detain them, demanding their identification without any probable cause that a crime has been committed.”
RELATED: We Were Detained by Hialeah Police for Making a Public Records Request at City Hall