What makes a journalist run for elected office?
Delegate Danica Roem and Chris Hurst discuss their transition from journalists to lawmakers and how it informs the issues they care about. We cover everything from FOIA laws to local issues. See more online at www.transitionva.com
Michael Pope
Welcome to Transition Virginia, the podcast that examines the ongoing transition of power in Virginia, I'm Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
And I'm Thomas Bowman. Today on the podcast, journalists turned lawmakers. It's really rare for the fourth estate to run for public office. And yet the General Assembly has two really prominent journalists turned lawmakers.
Michael Pope
So what's it like to leave behind the daily deadlines for the campaign trail? And how is their time as journalists inform their work in the General Assembly? We'll ask them. Joining us is a former anchor for WDBJ, who was, at one time, the youngest anchor in the country. In 2017, he decided to run for office and ousted incumbent Republican Delegate Joseph Yost. Delegate Chris Hurst, thanks for joining us.
Chris Hurst
Hey, Michael. Hey, Thomas. Good to be with you guys.
Thomas Bowman
We're also joined by the former reporter for the Gainesville Times and Prince William Times. In 2017, she decided to run for office and take on incumbent Republican Bob Marshall. She joined us earlier this year for a discussion of her bill outlawing the panic defense and an extended discussion of Metallica. Delegate Danica Roem, thanks for joining us again.
Danica Roem
Thank you so much for the invitation to be back. It's great to hear from you all again.
Michael Pope
So I guess I didn't warn you that we're also going to rank all the Black Sabbath albums. No, just kidding.
Chris Hurst
Are you gonna do that by the Ozzy years, the Deo years...
Michael Pope
I knew that you would say that. So let's talk about journalists becoming lawmakers. Now as we said at the top of the show, that's actually really rare, you almost never see it. There are a handful. Why, open question to the panel here, why do we think it's so rare that people leave the profession of journalism to become elected officials?
Chris Hurst
So I think one of the things is that part of our training is to be neutral, dispassionate, third party observers, as we are earning our journalism degrees, as we're going through the field, that we inherently just take on, not only just, you know, a lack of bias in terms of political affiliation, but at the same time, one of the things that we do is that we are truth tellers, we work in the business of accountability. And our job is to hold government officials accountable. And so when you make that transition from reporter to legislator, you carry a lot of the same skill sets with you. But at the same time, you also have to shift your mentality so that you understand that you are now that person being held accountable. And that the job that you do as a legislator should be that that you think, when you were reporter, a legislator should have been in the first place, which is open, transparent, steady stream of communication with the public and with their constituents. So that basically, there aren't really questions about who you are, what you're doing, because people already know.
Well, I think every reporter who's on the scene and interviews a politician at some point in their career, looks at them and says, "Well, hell, I think I could do what this idiot does."
Michael Pope
Guilty as charged.
Chris Hurst
Yeah, right. So I think that it does overlap a lot of different skill sets, you are exposed to a lot of the same kinds of issues, and are able to then have an informed opinion about them when you cross over into the political arena. But I really think that a lot of folks see the media and have a very low opinion of them. So I think for Danica and I, we just wanted to get into a career field where we were more respected than the media, so we picked politics.
Danica Roem
Wow.
Michael Pope
You mentioned earlier the sort of knee jerk reaction to be neutral and dispassionate. Was it difficult for either of you, or both of you, to make that leap to suddenly not be neutral and not be dispassionate?
Chris Hurst
It wasn't too terribly difficult for me. I think that, you know, it's not rocket science, how to maintain neutrality, and how to be an effective reporter, anchor, journalist, and do your job. But it doesn't mean that you still don't have opinions. I remember saying that I had to make that hard pivot, that I had to kind of go all in on this new approach if I wanted to be successful, which meant trying to run for elected office, and trying to share a vision for what you believe your community should be in the future. And that opinion, you know, is something that you would never solicit when you were in journalism, not that you didn't have them, but because you were professional, and that's, you know, part of what professionals do. But I made that hard pivot, and, and didn't look back.
So what I did was, I took one skills that I had developed as a print reporter, which was op eds, and writing editorials, for example, which is something I started doing, you know, quite a few years into my newspaper career. I basically took that skill set, and I started writing long form, you know, opinion stuff that I would put up on my Facebook page, for example, and anyone who knows me, and knows my style of legislating, is I never spare a detail, and that I will bury you in facts any chance that I get the opportunity to do so. And so like I wrote my own platform, it was like 2400 words or something like that. And what I did that was so different, in my primary in 2017, compared to a lot of other candidates, is every day, I would be commenting on the news, or I would be commenting on my predecessors bills, or you know, what he wasn't getting passed, what he was trying to prioritize whatever. And I would have these long form explainers that I would do online that were so researched, they were fact based, and I could, you know, show back to you know, people with graphics or whatever, and in that regard, I was able to do something that I was already good at, which was, you know, long form news writing, only, basically with the idea of like, okay, here's what I would do differently. And one of the things about news writing is that when you're writing for a newspaper, you get the luxury of calling out bad things, without necessarily having to identify an acceptable alternative, or at least not a lot of detail to that acceptable alternative. What I decided to do was have a lot of acceptable alternative. And one of the other good things that I had was my training at the hotline, my secret weapon in the campaign, was that I spent three and a half years covering campaigns for a federal and state campaigns for the National Journal's hotline. And that taught me everything I could possibly know about a campaign, without actually having been in one. And so by the time I had my candidate campaign training program with the LGBTQ Victory Institute in November 16, I was ready to go.
Thomas Bowman
Okay, so we've got two interesting stories here to talk about. Each of you leaving journalism and deciding to run for delegate and Danica, you were just alluding to some of that, would you expand on that decision and what you found once you left journalism, what made you decide to leave journalism and run for office, and which of those skills have translated the most?
Chris Hurst
Well, it's not unprecedented to do it. Delegate Lee Ware, he's been around the House for more than 20 years. He was a former reporter and editor in New Hampshire. Delegate Shelley Simon's who first ran in 2015, then again in '17, and was finally elected in 2019, she was a newspaper reporter in South America, actually, in Ecuador. And like the late state senator John Miller, he was a reporter. So it's not like reporters hadn't, run in Virginia, but it tended to be that you didn't have a lot of nationally known state legislators who happened to also have been reporters. And that's one of the very unique things that I actually brought to the table is that we were getting a disproportionate amount of media coverage. And I knew when I ran, that it was going to be a story, you know, transgender candidate runs against a bathroom bill author, you know, like, yeah, no kidding. So the skill sets that I was able to, to transfer were, you know, ability to research, to write, to ask questions, research more, ask more questions, come up with the first draft, go through an editorial process, come up with a final copy, go through a publication process, and then going in defending your piece. All of that is lateral. And at the same time, because I covered my district for more than nine years, and I'm from here, it was a real big help for me to be able to put together a very hyperlocal platform, based on the experience that I had developed as a newspaper reporter. And so after 10 and a half years of professionally reporting, four years of college, and even, you know, taking journalism classes in high school and such, I was at a point where I was making $24,000 with ten and a half years of experience as a newspaper editor, which was the same amount I was making as a rookie reporter in 2006. I was working two jobs, one 30 hours a week, $15 an hour, another weekend food delivery job for $5 an hour plus tip, just to try to pay the bills. And I was, I was burning out, I was just, I needed change at that point. And when the call came in from Delegate Rip Sullivan, asking me if I would consider running the day after Dawn Shaw, he ran in 2015, had asked me to do it, it came in at the right time. I was ready for a career shift at that point, but I would tell you, I miss being in the news for every single day, but getting that shield law passed last year, that was...that made it better.
Thomas Bowman
And Delegate Hurst, I'll ask you the same question. Could you tell us your story of deciding to leave journalism and what you found traits and skills have translated the best to being an elected official?
Chris Hurst
Yeah, sure. I mean, first, though, I want to talk...We were talking about how it's uncommon for reporters to run for office. But do you guys know what happened in Hawaii in 2002?
Thomas Bowman
No, what happened in Hawaii in 2002?
Chris Hurst
In Hawaii in 2002, about a half dozen reporters, either at local news stations, or the paper, or nationally at CNN, decided to run for office. There was a guy who ran for a state rep who is a reporter at KHON, a former CNN and local TV journalist ran for lieutenant governor, a another former TV reporter and producer who ran for city council, a reporter ran for State Senate, a councilman who was someone who ran for council as a reporter, this all happened in 2002, in one year. And I don't know what happened in that year. But when you read the news articles about why they decided to run for office, it was a lot of the same stuff that I was mentioning at the at the beginning, which is that a lot of people who are reporters, you know, they might get frustrated with the things that they see in politics, and think that they wanted to go in and try it themselves. And I don't think that...it is rare. And it's certainly, you know, rare in recent memory, that I can remember, except for for Danica and me, but it's so bizarre to me what happened in 2002 in Hawaii when you had six of them decide that they were going to, you know, leave their jobs and run for office.
Michael Pope
Yeah, you know, I've often thought covering the Hawaii State House would be a pretty sweet gig, right? I mean, like the former colleague of mine, Nancy Cook Lauer, writes for all Hawaii news. And I love seeing her updates. I bet Hawaii politics are super fun to cover. But Delegate Hurst, talk about your personal story, though, making that decision to leave the profession that you know, you have done basically all of your professional life. What was...walk us through that decision.
Chris Hurst
Well, that's kind of painful for me to talk about. And it's really kind of unique and strange. So like I, I, I wish that it has maybe some greater meaning towards kind of this notion of why reporters may decide to run for office, but you know, I've- 2015, Alison Parker and Adam Ward were murdered at Smith Mountain Lake live on television. Alison and I were dating at the time, we just moved in together. And I went back to the TV station, about 10 days after the shooting had happened, and you know, every single day at the TV station was incredibly difficult. Because we met at work, we fell in love at work, and then she died at work. And then I had to go back to work every single day after that. So, at some point, you just get really sick and tired of that. And you wonder if if there isn't a way for you to move forward and make something of your life when it was kind of all taken away from you. So I'd thought about going to other markets. You know, I had people, because I started as a reporter in Washington State in 2009, in Eastern Washington, home of the world's largest nuclear waste repository, because of the Hanford Site plant, the the nuclear reactor where they turned all of the uranium into plutonium for the nuclear warheads. Well, that turned out to be the biggest toxic waste cleanup that we've ever seen. But it was out in the middle of nowhere, and got caught in a tumbleweed storm my first day there and I'm like, "What the hell am I doing here making 18 grand a year," and was there for about a year and then got the job in Roanoke, and started as a reporter, and I did mostly reporting when I was in college, that's all I really wanted to do. And then the guy who had been there 30 years, Keith Humphrey, an institution in Western Virginia, retired. And they made me the six and 11 o'clock anchor, it was crazy. You know, the newspaper headline said, "When Keith Humphrey got the job at Channel 7, Chris Hurst wasn't even born yet." And, and so the whole time of my tenure at Channel 7 was first about proving myself, and about working hard, and about actually doing investigative reporting, and going down to the courthouse nearly every day, searching through search warrants, doing all of the stuff that is sometimes lost in different newsrooms around the country, and then met Allison and was incredibly happy, you know, the the TV couple, and, and then and then it all went away. And I thought that if I went to another market, you know, which is what you normally do. Roanoke is in the top 60 media markets in the country. And you know, you have Norfolk, which is a little bit bigger, Richmond is a little bit bigger. And then you have D.C., there were offers to go there, there were offers to go to New York, LA, all that. A lot of it, I kind of chalked up to charity and didn't really want to accept. And then I also felt like, if I did that, then it basically meant that my career was progressing the way that I will always was going to, even before you know, I met Allison. So I was like, "No, I pretty much want to make this a fundamental event in my life. One that initially can be terribly depressing. But that eventually could have some form of meaning and purpose." And the more I thought about that, the more I thought that public service might actually be something that I wanted to do. And then Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and I said, "Well, that jerk can get elected, then anybody can get elected." And I thought, "Well, why the hell not?" And, and I reached out, I reached out to the to the Party. You know, I didn't know anybody in the Democratic Party, I didn't vote in a lot of local elections, because that's kind of how I was instructed at journalism school and at Emerson, to try and take out any opportunity for you to have subconscious bias, you know, and by voting for somebody that you'd have to directly cover a lot. You know, I remember when my campaign did research on me, they saw my irregular voting history and thought that it could be used against me, and I explained it to them, and they thought that it made sense. But I reached out to them. And then eventually, we put a hell of a campaign together, and we were able to flip a seat. And then two years later, we were able to take the majority. And, you know, I, I'm really sensitive to still wanting to be independent, and not wanting to be seen, as you know, like a political hack or just some part of a party machine. But I think it's pretty incredible what we've done in the last two years, to help people, and not necessarily to try and accomplish a particular party's agenda, but we're really tangibly helping people in meaningful ways that has been delayed and delayed and delayed for years. Part of, you know, what I campaigned on in 2017 was, I was getting really tired of covering the same crap all the time, about our schools falling down, because they're underfunded, about people not being paid a reasonable wage and not being able to afford their bills, but people who get trapped in the criminal justice system and can never get out, you know, and we've taken a lot of meaningful action on that. And so I really do think that what I did was was the right choice.
Thomas Bowman
It's great to have both of you in the General Assembly, I think you guys bring so much to the table. And one of the things that you guys bring to the table, I've watched you in committee, and I've watched you on the floor. You're both great, and I think this comes from being journalists, you're both great at sniffing out when something somebody says doesn't quite sound right. And you dig in, and you ask the follow up questions, and I've seen you trip up, not not because you want to trip them up, but just because you want to dig in to the meat of issues, I've watched you both do that. And I think that definitely comes from having been a journalist.
Chris Hurst
Well, I remember, it happened a few weeks ago, when we had that bill about VDOT and right away in retrieving dogs. And we were misled as an Assembly on what the intention and origin of the bill was. And, and so I needed to draw attention to that. And I remember, you know, we, there are lots of us that have, you know, group texts and everything and, and folks were saying that, you know, there's the investigative reporter, you know, rearing his ugly head again. Yeah, I think for me, I I don't know. I really want to be a workhorse and not a show horse, and Danica is exactly the same way. I think a lot of times, we can't get out of a spotlight, even if sometimes we're trying to maybe pass it to somebody else. But I think like, Danica also showed a tenacity like this real great reporter's tenacity. And I have, I have so many fun stories to share of when I did that sometimes to ill effect. But, you know, when she was trying to get notification for people who are receiving public assistance, for those folks to get additional notification on other benefits, they may be entitled to, I mean, she was running back and forth on the floor, you know, going, passing the bill by temporarily working it out. And then she and she worked it out. And then if there's one thing that Virginia's General Assembly is that's totally different from D.C., it's that if it's a bill with your name on it, you are the one who has to get that damn thing passed, because no one else is going to do it for you. And Danica, you know, is just so tenacious and so fierce. What was that bill? It was on, it had to do with DSS, right?
Well, one, thank you Delegate Hurst, that's very kind of you. And second, yeah, that was the bill where I have been working with the Department of Taxation, Department of Social Services, it was basically designed to combat child welfare fraud, which you would think everyone would be able to agree on. And nothing came up on second reading, like, which is when you're supposed to debate and so instead, they tell me that the morning of third reading, I was like, "No, no, keep in mind, my mother's from the Bronx. And I was raised in Italian Sicilian household. You're not killing my bill. No." So I had to take on Delegate Lee Ware, who's an absolute gentleman, by the way, you know, I'm not gonna say negative thing about him. He really is a statesman. I could tell he was telling me that he was not too enthused about having to kill that bill. And so I stood up on the House floor, made my case for it, he withdrew his motion to send it back, I made the best case I could for the bill based on my word and my work ethic. And yeah, I actually ended up winning kind of a gag gift award from the Caucus afterward for the "Never Say Die Award," which is named after Black Sabbath album. But one of the stories I was again tell was last year I was in the House Transportation subcommittee and one of the members from the other side, who had, like me, been critical of the tolls on I-66 was introducing a bill to add reverse tolls to I-66. Because for some reason, this makes sense in the Republican Caucus, that they're opposed to tolls, so they want to add more tolls. And so I told some of the members sitting next to me, I was like, "Let me handle this one." And I just started asking question after question after question. And I got to a point of saying like, "So I would ask the delegate here. would she say do your constituents ever go into D.C. during the evening, or come home in the morning?" And he's like, "Yes," it's like, "Okay, so you're saying that your constituents, some of them will end up paying more tolls because of this bill. But you're against tolling, right?" And it was the only time I motion to PVI a bill the entire year. Because PVI is like the harshest death, you can give a bill, and typically we just gently lay a bill on the table, but that one had to die violently for a reason. And it was just like, I wanted to make a case on this of do not show up in front of the Transportation Committee telling us one thing publicly, and then trying to act another way once you get here, that's just not how things are going to be. And yes, so I've also seen Delegate Hurst really, really go into account and one of the things I really like with him is on the House floor, very rarely do you see our former news anchor ever stutter or trip over his words, he's always has his speeches well put together, even if he's doing it on the fly. He always has, like such a good argument for when he makes them. But when the Republicans try to gang up on him, or try to surprise him, he calls them on their crap every single time. He's so good on his feet, and he's so good on the floor. It's just really something to watch.
Well, I sometimes need to filter myself and have more that attitude I had when I was on the TV station to make sure I didn't curse on air. But you know, calling everybody chumps last year was probably not the right thing to do. It didn't help my bill get passed.
Danica Roem
That's eloquent.
Chris Hurst
Yeah, but you know, I think when you're on TV, and I initially pursued TV news because I wanted a job where I pretty much could just watch television all day, and when I was a kid, I was a juvenile delinquent, go into summer school, failing classes, detention every day, so, and I was also a choir boy when I was a kid, so I guess I just, you know, I do like to hear myself talk, just like most politicians do, and I'm working on it. You know, I don't like to do extended questioning of people who come to testify on bills, or delegates as they're presenting their bills or senators. I try and be respectful of people's time. And, and, and that I really try and do my homework ahead of time. And I really try hard not to make people look bad, unless they really are just trying to pull a fast one on us. I do think that we have a lot of questions, you know, especially on the floor, I wish that people would just say what they want to say and speak to the bill, instead of trying to bait other delegates into like lines of questioning that are always not started in in good faith. So as just, I have a lot of thoughts on kind of how we do the process of legislating because it's so much like a sport with a with a rulebook, and unwritten rules, and etiquette. That's a lot of the stuff that I try and pay attention to that I think is really important that that I try and be a good colleague.
Thomas Bowman
Okay, well, we've got to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll discuss how being a journalist can inform the issues an elected official can care about, and so we'll discuss what some of those issues are, when we return from the break.
Michael Pope
And we're back on Transition Virginia. We're going to talk about an issue that our journalists turned lawmakers have something to say about, which is FOIA requests. Now all journalists have stories about FOIA requests that have gone wrong, or more to the point, FOIA requests that have been deterred by a local government, or any government really, charging money. So governments can charge money for the staff time, but they play around with this. And they do a lot of shady things. I'll give you a couple of good examples here. In Arlington, our listeners may remember several years ago, there was a police chief from Alexandria. So this is a neighboring jurisdiction police chief, gets arrested for DUI in Arlington. And so the police agency there said, "Oh, you want the booking photo for David Baker? We're going to charge you $24 for the booking photo," and actually charged four different news organizations for a total of $96 that they took in by just giving that booking photo out to four different news agencies. Arlington, also, like all police agencies, we'll talk about police agencies in the next segment, but they refuse to hand over all kinds of documents like incident reports, and investigations, that are available in most other states. So I was trying to get an incident report from an incident when the police killed a teenager. And they refused to give me the document, but they would give me a six line summary of the document that they were going to keep secret. But oh, by the way, they're going to charge for the staff time. So $31 for a six line summary of a document that they were going to keep secret. And then there was also a time when I tried to get all the FOIA requests that were sent to the Arlington police department. They wanted to charge me $573 for just a copy of the FOIA requests, not the actual responses, just the requests. So Delegate Roem, you have a bill on this that is now being considered by the FOIA Council, right? Talk a little bit about this effort to crack down on governments like Arlington, that abused the FOIA process to keep public documents secret.
Chris Hurst
Oh, why should I look at Arlington when I can look at my home of Prince William County? You know, I think this is one of those issues where before I got sworn in, so this is after the '17 election but going into '18, I was on the phone with the Virginia Municipal League. And I was planning to introduce the first version of my bill to ban FOIA fees, particularly for the first two hours takes complete a FOIA request. And I told them that, "Look we have seen exorbitant 10s of 1000s of dollars worth of FOIA fees being distributed in single FOIA cases." And they actually conceded to me that FOIA fees are used as a deterrent. And that's the problem. Because if FOIA fees are even to exist in the first place, and in some other states, they don't, then they should only exclusively be used to cover the actual associated cost of staff time that it takes to produce those documents. And that's it. You can't use them as a deterrent, because that is keeping away taxpayer funded documents from the public, from the taxpayers, who have funded them in the first place. And that is completely wrong. And keep in mind, reporters are the public and Delegate Hurst and I definitely had the same training about whether or not you're supposed to participate in the political process, when you're a reporter, I came to a different conclusion, which was that becoming a reporter did not mean that I lost my constitutional rights to address grievances with my government. And so you know, most of that I got to do by, you know, just by, you know, covering the news. But the other part was, I do get a say, and I do get to vote, and it is a private ballot the end of the day. But anyway, going into the '18 session, when I, you know, when they told me, it was a deterrent, I was like, "Okay, we need to do something about that." But the Republicans had a majority at the time. And my prioritization at the time, was actually what I thought was gonna be a little bit easier of a lift, was to get a Freedom of Information Act ombudsman at the state level, who could help mediate FOIA disputes. I thought, if we had something like that, that in and of itself would cut down on perhaps some of the need for FOIA fees in the first place. So I worked that FOIA ombudsman bill for my first three years in office, and it gradually crawled along, but still never made it to the House floor. And that's something I'll be bringing back next year. But what I will say in the meantime, though, is that I had a constituent named Stephanie Minor, whose daughter is autistic and was on a school bus, from my former elementary school, Loch Lomond to Mullen Elementary, so right here in 13th district, and she had been physically dragged on the bus by an adult because she was basically more or less having a panic attack. And the mom, Stephanie, she wanted to see the video of what happened to her kid. And she was being told it was going to cost 1000s and 1000s of dollars to be able to get and in fact, she had paid hundreds of dollars up front, just to be able to put in the request in the first place. And then for a redacted video, they were going to charge her four figures for it. And I think was like WJLA had to end up like covering part of the cost. And she got a shorter version of it than she wanted. And it was absolutely ridiculous that this mother who wanted to see what happened to her child, was having to make the equivalent of half a year's worth of paying the mortgage. And I thought, "That is ridiculous." So I knew when I filed that bill, this session, that the bill was inevitably going to go to the FOIA Advisory Council. So what I decided to do was from the get go, I said, "Okay, look, I'm gonna get VML on and get VACO 13 sociation counties in Virginia misbelief, I want to get Virginia Coalition for open government, I want to get my constituent here. And I want to get some of the members of the House General Loss Committee, and we're going to talk about how this bill should go about getting to the Advisory Council and what will happen once it's there." And the goal here is basically for us to get a recommendation from the FOIA Advisory Council that we can then present as legislation next year, just like Delegate Hurst did with his police records bill from the 2020 Special Session that he was able to get passed this year.
Michael Pope
Delegate Hurst, I want to play devil's advocate, or I guess, in this case, it would be government advocate, which is sometimes they're overwhelmed with FOIA requests, and there is actual staff time. What would you say to local governments who were concerned about their staff time being used to respond to FOIA requests from not just journalists, but the public as well?
Chris Hurst
Yeah, I don't have as big of an issue overall with pricing people out for fees, even though it definitely does happen. My experience though, is colored by the fact that I worked for a legacy station at Channel 7 and I remember we were trying to get information on school disciplinary actions by school division from DMV, and they said it was going to cost $3500 in order to provide the documents with the staff time and with the cost and all that. And I remember going to Dave Siedel, who was our assignment manager, who's now the news director at WVTF and radio-
Michael Pope
And my boss, currently my boss, right?
Chris Hurst
So I went into a room with Dave, and I was like, "Dave, I think they're, I think they're trying to, deny us this request by pricing us out." And he's like, "Well how much is it?" and I said, "It's like $3,000." And he looks at me and he goes, "Yeah, we can pay that." And, you know, sometimes you want to call them on their bluff, too. It is a game, I think, on a lot of these cases, and I'd love to take gamesmanship out of it. But the whole reason why we have it in FOIA code to allow for reasonable charges is because it does take up a lot of time. And with this FOIA bill for Criminal Investigative files that's coming online on on July 1, to do I think it's going to be this cascade of work that is going to besiege our law enforcement organizations, those custodians of record, no, but it is still going to be something they're going to have to physically do. And so I'm sensitive to that. I can, I can understand that.
Thomas Bowman
Okay, so legislative emails are considered working documents and exempt from FOIA and that infuriates people trying to get to the bottom of an issue sometimes. So what is your perspective on this? And how has it changed, if at all, since becoming an elected?
Chris Hurst
Well, I have a newfound appreciation for how a bill actually becomes a law and how much the Division of Legislative Services really is a part of that. And those attorneys at the Division of Legislative Services are our counsel, they are acting as our attorney. And I have frequent email conversations back and forth, I can think of a couple of email threads right now where I was talking with those attorneys. And there is, you know, there's privilege for that, because we're having honest conversations about something that is about, you know, writing that legislation in a very technical way. And I wouldn't have a problem with opening up access, and letting people kind of see more of the process and how the sausage gets made. But I think one of the main reasons why I would, you know, honestly be a little apprehensive about that is because I'm pretty glib and pretty honest with my email responses, and I just wouldn't, Lord knows everybody takes everything out of context right now, I wouldn't want that to happen.
So when my office gets FOIA requests, we never throw around the idea of charging someone a fee, even if it's frivolous, even if it's annoying. We just do the damn thing. We just process it and we get it done, you know, and from 2017, I was getting the question of, "Well, okay, so maybe some of these FOIA fees are excessive, but what do you do about frivolous ones? What someone who's just gonna start filing them willy nilly," I'm like, "Oh, look, you can put a reasonable cap, you can do X, Y, or Z, there are ways to mitigate this. But if you shut down the conversation before it gets started, and you're coming at it from the approach of 'how do I kill this bill,' as opposed to 'how do I work to make it so that the public has more accessibility to their documents in the first place,' then that means that you're approaching the issue from the wrong angle," and one of my perks as legislators is, "How do we get to yes?" I mean, look, I have voted against a lot of FOIA exemptions. Even what I remember Delegate Hearst actually call it over to me and be like, "You sure on this one?" But at the same time, when there's FOIA exemption bills that are on the uncontested calendar, you want to pick your battles a bit. And so I don't have a perfect record on on opposing every single one. But I am really picky. And so that if any of them are on the regular calendar, oh my god, I'll vote against it in a heartbeat. Just I want us to strengthen FOIA instead of treating it like the Swiss cheese that the Virginia General Assembly has for decades now.
Michael Pope
Speaking of FOIA exemptions, we're gonna take a break and talk about police documents, which are exempted largely from public disclosure. So we'll be right back.
And we're back on Transition Virginia, we're talking to former journalists turned lawmakers about their experience in the General Assembly and how they take that experience from journalism into their work as lawmakers. Now, in this most recent Session, Delegate Hurst, you had a very interesting bill about police documents. I think many of our listeners probably would be surprised to learn how unavailable police documents are in Virginia. I actually started my work as a journalist down in Florida. And one of my first jobs in journalism was driving to the local police department every day, and getting a stack of incident reports, and driving them back to the newspaper, and then sort of typing them up. And so that's when you would sort of find interesting things that are in the documents and put them in the newspaper, right? So when I got to Virginia, I went to my local police department, I said, "Okay, where are my incident reports?" And they said, "We're not going to give them to you." And I said, "What do you mean, they're not going to give them to me?" And so I spent years trying, asking, pleading, issuing FOIA requests, talking to elected officials, and just got nowhere with getting police documents. Delegate Hurst, talk about your bill and your own personal experience with this issue.
Chris Hurst
Sure. So right now, and it only has been for the last couple of decades, if you are inquiring about something that police responded to, they can give you what's called incident information, which is basically time, place, some other details, what you might need in order to put together a little blurb in your paper, or put on to your newscast. Now, that's important relevance, because you know, that's the primary way that people are able to understand and consume what's going on in their community. So the press certainly does have a role to play in informing the public of what's going on. And we do that with criminal incident information. What is still not legal, although it will be, is the automatic release of Criminal Investigative files. So this is the investigation, you know, what's in that manila folder that has all of the relevant materials that the law enforcement agencies using as they are investigating a crime or potential crime. It is exceedingly difficult to get those records right now, it is a discretionary release.
Michael Pope
Delegate Hurst, can I jump in here real quick? So you said it's discretionary. My experience dealing with police departments in Virginia is it's always discretionary one way, "We're not going to give it to you." So they've got this discretion. And I think they actually fear that if there is any police department that is using their discretion to share information, that that will create a precedent that they don't want to follow. And I actually did a project years ago, where I tried to FOIA different kinds of police documents, they would not give me any of them. So like I asked for an incident report for a robbery that happened in my neighborhood. And I asked for an incident report of high profile arrest. And I asked for an incident report of a case that had been closed. And I could ask for like, you know, what sort of I picked different kinds of cases. And what I found was, they would always say no, in all circumstances, because they didn't want to set a precedent. So it's true that they have this discretion. But they always use the discretion one way.
Chris Hurst
Yeah, I did seven years as a crime and court reporter in Roanoke, and I never had a FOIA request accepted for Criminal Investigative files. And I did Cold Case the series in conjunction with local law enforcement and the Virginia State Police. And they partnered with us on doing Cold Case stories. And even still, we were only able to get sometimes just a photograph as far as being able to look at a case file.
Michael Pope
I think that this is probably the most surprising thing to listeners and people that might not be aware of the details of how this work, that even in closed cases, they still won't give you the documents.
Chris Hurst
No. And that is destructive to the public. Because I think it erodes trust in our institutions, especially one that is so important as law enforcement to investigate crimes that happened to us as citizens. But also remember that it's not just about helping the press, in fact, I think that's, you know, a secondary tertiary thing that you can even look at. This is about, you know, really making sure that when these case files are completed, we're not even talking pending here, because that's another huge issue and weighty thing to try and tackle, that as an investigation is still pending, what ability do you have to gather that information which you described in Florida, right, go into the stack, those are all those are all pending investigation, incident reports you're getting, and they still gave them to you in Florida, and that's not what's going to change in Virginia. What it would be for would be for completed cases. And that's so critically important because we have cases in Virginia, where folks have really been harmed and negatively because of bad behavior in police investigations. Look at the Norfolk Four where you had four men who are wrongfully convicted of a 1997 rape and murder. And we've found out that a detective coerced the men into admitting the crime, and now there is a real plea out there to figure out well, what other cases was he involved in that he also might have coerced individuals into confessing? And we we need access to those files in order to do work for stuff like that. Being able to look at what officers really wrote in their incident reports, as they are describing what happened in an officer involved shooting. Because if what they say in that incident report isn't matched up by body camera footage or witness testimony, that's really really important stuff to know, as these cases are completed. So there's tons of things that we need to look at with these closed investigative files. And yet, it's still, I don't think, is going to be able to fully shed light on all of the things that I think the public would love to have further understanding of. I think, at this time, in our society, where we are, we support law enforcement, we really want them to be great partners with us in our community, we want to give them the resources and the tools and the support that they need in order to do that. But the public, I think right now, would really love to have some more understanding, and some and some more investigation into why these terrible things keep happening. And I think this legislation is part of that overall criminal justice reform package, that we have tried to thoughtfully and methodically pass in the General Assembly to make sure that we can improve relationships, not erode them, to improve relationships, because, again, the public has to give consent in order to be governed. And I think a lot of people right now, when they say, "Say my name," I can't breathe," and that, "I support Black Lives Matter," they're saying that, "We didn't consent to this type of governing." And I think it's up to us as lawmakers to try and provide tools and opportunities for us to have a greater understanding and try and change the dynamic.
Michael Pope
Delegate Roem, what would you say to someone from the law enforcement community that would say, "These documents, the Delegate Hurst wants would jeopardize an investigation? And even if it's a closed case, the document in that closed case might jeopardize an investigation of a separate case that's an open case. So we need the secrecy to do our work." What would you say to that argument?
Chris Hurst
So we have existing precedent for this in other states, Virginia doesn't have to be the most hard ass state in the nation for everything. Sometimes, we can actually have a little bit of transparency in our government. And we can actually use FOIA to get information and to give people their documents, instead of looking at it from the angle of, "Okay, what loophole can we use to get around having to do it?" And what Delegate Hurst is asking for here, and what the law is now, is not going to impede an existing criminal investigation, nor is it going to hurt your ability to go back into, you know, file here. What we're doing here is we're trying to bring the light to real problems that have come up, and they're sort of requests that are going to come up for this are not going to be frequent. But when they do come up, they're going to matter a lot.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, that's a nice place to leave. If you have comments, questions, disagreements, serious objections to what you just heard, or maybe you only want to tell us what you think about the show, write an email, send it to us at TransitionVApodcast@gmail.com so we can read it on the air. Subscribe to Transition Virginia anywhere pods are cast, follow the Transition Team on Twitter @TransitionVA and find us on the web at transitionvirginia.com. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you can enjoy our next episode of Transition Virginia.
