Nikolai Mather: Alright, I'm here with Carli Brousseau – she's an investigative reporter with The Assembly. Carli, welcome.
Carli Brousseau: Thank you. Happy to be here.
NM: Alright, so, your publication is one of the two news organizations suing the Columbus County Sheriff's Office. Why?
CB: Sarah Nagem at Border Belt Independent and I realized that we were both doing reporting on Columbus County Sheriff's Office some time ago, and we had both been making records requests and discussed how we had both been largely unsuccessful. So we'd been doing more reporting together, and as time went on — as we continued to be unsuccessful — we decided to go ahead and see if we could get some legal representation to make some progress there.
NM: How long had y'all been requesting these documents?
CB: These requests go back to October 2022, so nearly two years now. The oldest requests were made by the Border Belt Independent, and I made some follow up requests beginning the following year.
NM: So, in your article on this lawsuit for The Assembly, which you published on Tuesday, you talk about how this lawsuit has roots in your coverage of former Sheriff Jody Greene and his deputies. Can you tell me what records you're trying to find and obtain from the sheriff's office?
CB: A lot of our requests have been for communications between various people involved in the sheriff's office and in the county's administration, to understand what the internal debate had been, and kind of "who knew what when." Some of the subsequent reporting was on specific allegations that we were hearing in the community, and so we were asking for particular reports from the sheriff's office or communications involving particular deputies. There have been kind of a whole range of things, but those are the main things we're trying to capture.
NM: What reason — if any — did the county give for refusing to comply with your public records requests?
CB: For some requests, we got no response whatsoever, even after our attorneys followed up. For others, we got a specific exemption, such as the personnel records exemption, which many agencies interpret in a fairly broad way, but which our attorneys disagreed with in this case. We also got, in some cases, some records that were partially released, and we didn't get a full accounting of why the full thing was not released.
NM: What effects do you hope this lawsuit will have on Columbus County? How do you think it'll impact transparency in the area?
CB: Well, North Carolina's public records law requires that government agencies respond as promptly as possible, and it has been a problematic part of the law that that can be interpreted quite loosely. So we're hoping, in this lawsuit, to get a firmer understanding from the judicial establishment about how that term is defined.
I hope that'll have a substantial effect, because we've had a lot of obstacles in just getting folks' attention at all, and there is a history of that in this area. The News Reporter, which is the newspaper in Whiteville, and several other news organizations have sued the sheriff's office in the past, which had stopped releasing really basic reports about their activities in the community. And so we're hoping that this just sets the tone that, you know, media locally and across the state won't tolerate that kind of violation of the state's public records law. That the bar for transparency is much higher.
NM: That was Carli Brousseau from The Assembly, talking about her lawsuit against the Columbus County Sheriff's Office. Carli, thanks for chatting.
CB: Thank you.
