Office promises timely release of reports after fixing ‘glitch’

ELYRIA — Officials at the Lorain County sheriff’s office said this week that they’ve enacted new guidelines to ensure the timely release of incident reports.

The department’s new guidelines instructs the sheriff’s staff — including all records clerks, deputy sergeants and others who handle incident reports — to release the reports within 24 hours of when they’re created, albeit with very few exemptions.

Sheriff’s officials said earlier this month that they’d been experiencing a “glitch” in their records-handling process that resulted in hundreds of incident reports not being released.

The changes came about after a story Sunday detailed the department’s abysmal record at making reports available to the public.

From late March to early May, the department released only about half of its incident reports, The Chronicle found.

The reports eventually were made public after The Chronicle filed a public records request.

Sheriff’s officials say the new guidelines for handling incident reports should bring the department into total compliance with public records law, which requires the disclosure of the reports in a timely manner.

Sheriff’s Capt. Jim Drozdowski said that “face sheets” containing basic information on incidents — including time, date, location and witnesses — will be released for every incident, and report narratives detailing each incident will also be released when required by Ohio’s public records law.

Reports from open or active cases, Drozdowski said, will only be released when cleared by the sheriff’s detectives, but the department will still release the basic information from the incidents to which deputies responded.

Contact Shawn Foucher at 329-7197 or sfoucher@chroniclet.com.

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