MERCER COUNTY: Split ruling in website’s open records lawsuit

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Mercer County’s top judge ruled Wednesday that website Planet Princeton is not entitled to a jurisdictional response map detailing protocols between the Princeton Police Department and the Princeton University Department of Public Safety.
But in a split ruling, Superior Court Judge Mary C. Jacobson, sitting in Trenton, also said website founder Krystal Knapp can get a list showing which agency has primary responsibility for handling and investigating various incidents, from welfare checks to more serious crimes.
Both sides did not immediately indicate afterward if they intend to appeal the part of the judge’s decision they had lost in a case that touched on the state Open Public Records Act and common law access to government records, issues the state’s courts are wrestling with.
From the bench, Judge Jacobson expressed concern that releasing the color-coded map — showing who has primary responsibility to respond to where — would create a security risk if one fell in the hands of someone intending to do harm on campus.
“How can you look at a university with 8,000 students and not think of Virginia Tech?” she asked at one point in reference to the massacre there by a student in 2007.
In arriving at her conclusion, she relied heavily on the certification that the executive director of campus security, Paul L. Ominsky, had submitted. Mr. Ominsky, who was in court but did not speak, opposed releasing the information.
A chief concern from the university’s standpoint was that a map in the hands of a bad actor would eliminate the guesswork of knowing where an armed Princeton Police officer would be responding to versus an unarmed university security officer. In effect, the school was concerned it would steer criminal activity to where an unarmed officer is going to respond to and pose the risk of an ambush.
The university permits its security force to have access to rifles in limited situations, like an active shooter on campus.
In the end, the judge sided with Mr. Ominsky and said she did not want to provide “any tool” to a criminal. She said the release of the map, which she reviewed in her chambers during a break in the oral arguments, would create a risk to unarmed officers.
Yet at the same time, she said she saw no similar risk in releasing the list of responsibilities — rejecting the rationale of Mr. Ominsky for keeping that private.
“Does it sound like I’m inconsistent?” she said rhetorically at one point.
She noted that the operating agreements between the two agencies that Ms. Knapp had received already spell out some of those details.
“We appreciate the ruling on the map being exempt from disclosure,” said Princeton assistant vice president for communications Dan Day outside the courtroom. “And on the matter of the statement of responsibilities, we respect the judge’s decision.”
Ms. Knapp, who sat at the plaintiff’s table next to her lawyer, said afterward that she “overall” was satisfied with Wednesday’s outcome.
“We got most of what we wanted in this,” she said outside the courtroom.
The judge’s admittedly “difficult decision” came at the end of oral arguments by lawyers for Ms. Knapp and the university, which was fighting to block the disclosure of records Ms. Knapp sought earlier this year.
In February, she filed a public records request with Municipal Clerk Linda McDermott’s office seeking copies of operating agreements between the two law enforcement agencies and other supporting documents. In May 2013, the agencies reached an agreement in which they declared they have “concurrent police jurisdiction over those geographic areas of the Princeton University campus and its vicinity which fall within the political subdivision of the town of Princeton.”
The town turned down Ms. Knapp’s records request, so she sued in state Superior Court. Municipal officials did an about-face by releasing some but not all of what Ms. Knapp was seeking, with the university stepping in to block the disclosure of the more sensitive material.
Lawyer James P. Lidon, the attorney for the university, urged the judge not to release the “playbook” for how law enforcement is going to respond to a given incident. He said any incremental risk for law enforcement is “too much risk.”
But Ms. Knapp’s lawyer Walter M. Luers told the judge that the town of Princeton was willing to release the information and that the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office did not step in to block the disclosure.