Background
In 2021, The Washington Post submitted three Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) requests to the Ocean City Police Department (OCPD) seeking records related to officer use of force. The requests covered: (1) statistical use-of-force (UOF) reports from a department database for the period January 2016 through June 2021; (2) internal UOF Review records for two specific June 2021 incidents; and (3) all records documenting any internal review of Lt. Frank Wrench’s conduct on the night of May 31, 2020. The OCPD produced a spreadsheet in partial response to the first request but stripped officer names. It denied the second and third requests outright, classifying UOF Reviews as exempt personnel records and asserting they fell outside the scope of Anton’s Law’s carve-out for misconduct investigation records.
Anton’s Law — Senate Bill 178 enacted by the Maryland General Assembly in 2021 as part of the Maryland Police Accountability Act — amended the MPIA to remove records relating to administrative or criminal investigations of police misconduct from the mandatory personnel-records exemption under GP § 4-311. Previously, such records were largely shielded from public disclosure as personnel records. The new law reclassified them as records subject to discretionary denial under GP § 4-351 and required mandatory redaction of specified personal information before release. The Post sued in the Circuit Court for Worcester County in January 2023, which granted summary judgment to the Post on Counts I and II and ordered full, unredacted release of both the UOF Reports and UOF Reviews. Ocean City timely appealed.
The central dispute on appeal was whether OCPD’s UOF Reports (with officer names) constituted exempt personnel records, and whether the UOF Reviews — internal chain-of-command reviews of use-of-force incidents — qualified as investigatory records of police misconduct subject to disclosure under Anton’s Law even though they were generated proactively rather than in response to a formal complaint.
The Court’s Holding
The Appellate Court of Maryland, in an opinion by Judge Leahy, affirmed the circuit court’s rulings that neither the UOF Reports nor the UOF Reviews are protected from disclosure as personnel records under GP § 4-311(a), but vacated the order for full release of the UOF Reviews and remanded for further proceedings. On the UOF Reports, the court held that they are not personnel records because they are created to satisfy statutory reporting requirements rather than for performance evaluation purposes, are not used as personnel records, and officers have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the information given that OCPD already makes corresponding Incident Reports available on request. Ocean City bore the burden of proving otherwise and failed to carry it.
On the UOF Reviews, the court held that they constitute administrative investigatory records expressly removed by Anton’s Law from the personnel-records exemption. The court rejected Ocean City’s argument that Anton’s Law applies only to investigations triggered by citizen or officer complaints. Because PS § 3-101(g)’s definition of “police misconduct” contains no such limitation, and because PS § 3-514 independently requires statewide annual reporting on every use of force, the UOF Reviews — which memorialize internal chain-of-command examinations of force incidents — fall within the category of records defined under GP § 4-311(c). Reading Anton’s Law to exclude proactively generated reviews would frustrate the statute’s core purpose of making police use-of-force accountability records publicly available.
The court vacated the circuit court’s order for full, immediate release of the UOF Reviews because the MPIA’s mandatory redaction provisions had not yet been applied. Under GP § 4-351(d)(1) as amended by Anton’s Law, the records custodian must redact medical information, personal contact information, and family information of the subject officer before release. The custodian may also redact witness information beyond personal contact details and may invoke other applicable MPIA exemptions or deny disclosure of discrete portions contrary to the public interest under GP § 4-343. The court remanded for the OCPD to conduct that review and produce appropriately redacted records.
Key Takeaways
- Use-of-force reports that police departments are statutorily required to generate are not personnel records under the MPIA, and officers’ names in those reports are not exempt from disclosure.
- Anton’s Law’s removal of police misconduct investigation records from the personnel-records exemption is not limited to complaint-driven investigations; proactively generated internal chain-of-command use-of-force reviews also fall within the disclosure mandate.
- Even where records must be disclosed under Anton’s Law, custodians retain the obligation — and some discretion — to redact medical information, personal contact information, and family information before release, and may invoke other applicable MPIA exemptions on a document-by-document basis.
- Courts ordering release of police misconduct records must afford the records custodian an opportunity to perform mandatory redactions required by GP § 4-351(d) before compelling production of the full, unredacted file.
Why It Matters
This decision significantly advances the transparency regime created by Maryland’s 2021 police reform package. By confirming that Anton’s Law reaches internal use-of-force reviews regardless of whether a formal complaint initiated them, the court closes a potential loophole that police departments could have exploited to withhold accountability records simply by framing routine supervisory reviews as performance management rather than misconduct oversight. The ruling signals that Maryland courts will read Anton’s Law’s disclosure mandate broadly and in alignment with the statute’s express public-accountability purpose.
For practitioners and records requesters, the decision clarifies the procedural sequence that courts must follow when ordering disclosure: mandatory redactions come first, and a blanket order for full release without providing the custodian an opportunity to redact is reversible error. For law enforcement agencies, the case underscores that the burden falls on the agency to demonstrate that including specific information — such as officer names — transforms an otherwise disclosable record into an exempt personnel record, a burden that routine use-of-force tracking data is unlikely to satisfy.