The following are excerpts from Westbrook City Solicitor William Dale’s report regarding the missing records from the arrest of Fire Inspector Lt. Charles Jarrett:

As explained in more detail below, I found no evidence suggesting the city intentionally hid or masked Lt. Jarrett’s arrest or intentionally hid or masked the record(s) relating to the same (with one exception noted below); in short, for a variety of mundane reasons, this arrest did not show up on the city’s computer-based records system when a newspaper reporter asked for a summary of records less than 48 hours after the arrest.

However, several changes- some easy to implement, and others less so – can and probably should be implemented to prevent such an incident from recurring. While respecting the privacy rights of persons arrested is obviously important, and in many circumstances required by law, there are also legitimate competing interests in complying fully with requests by citizens for information made public by law, particularly where the failure to do so can, where one of the city’s own public safety employees has been arrested, undermine the public’s confidence in the system as a whole…

…There are a number of reasons why Lt. Jarrett’s arrest on Jan. 18 didn’t show up in the (record) request made routinely two days later on Jan. 20 and again routinely a week later on Jan. 27. First, because of the “sensitivity” of the Jan. 18 arrest, it was not coded into the CAD system as an arrest either before it occurred or after it occurred that evening. It was deemed “sensitive” because of the principal nature of the offense, i.e., an alleged violation of a protection from abuse order, concern by the police chief for the person to be arrested and, as a function of those first two concerns, a decision – apparently not uncommon – to keep the proposed arrest as discreet as possible within the building so that Lt. Jarrett was not notified in advance of the planned arrest. Also, after the arrest, the police officers called into the station by cell phone rather than police radio to confirm the arrest and to indicate that the arrest had occurred and that they were taking Lt. Jarrett to the county jail in Portland.

Second, by happenstance, Lt. Jarrett lives in Windham, not Westbrook, and so when the arrest occurred there, a call for service in Windham’s CAD showed up, but not in Westbrook’s system. Similarly, there was that evening a report of the arrest generated at the Cumberland County Jail, and the basic outline of that report was available at the county jail that evening, had anyone known or thought to look there.

And third, for a variety of routine reasons, the paper work on the arrest had not been processed by the records secretary less than 48 hours later when the reporter asked for the three CAD code print outs for the last seven days. Subsequently, when the reporter the next Friday, Jan. 27, asked for the three CAD code print outs for the then-most recent seven days, the Jarrett arrest was nine days old and so not printed.

There is one other specific occurrence relating to the “missing” arrest record that must be mentioned. Apparently when the relatively new reporter from the American Journal asked routinely on Jan. 20 (two days after the arrest) and then a week later on Jan. 27 (nine days after the arrest) for arrest records, he did not know about the Jarrett arrest and so did not know that anything was missing. However, when he later independently learned about it, he called the station and specifically asked the records secretary for the “arrest report” involved. That was a technical error on his part because, under the Criminal History Records Information Act, that term includes more information then the law allows to be disclosed; what he should have been asking for was the “arrest sheet,” the more limited disclosure permitted by the statute. The records clerk immediately perceived the significance of the difference in terminology and brought the issue to the police chief’s attention. Unfortunately, rather than instructing her to give him the “arrest sheet” to which he was entitled, the chief – in a technically correct, but nonetheless misleading response – told her to tell him he wasn’t entitled to the “arrest report.” In short, the new reporter was denied access to information to which he was entitled because he used the technically wrong term in his request.

Conclusion

There were a number of factors that were responsible for the arrest’s failure to appear in response to the Jan. 20 request. While the “sensitivity” accorded to the proposed arrest may be second-guessed at this time. I truly feel there was no intention on the part of any of the individuals involved to hide anything…The chief’s subsequent decision to deny access to the “arrest sheet” when the reporter had finally learned of the incident can only be described as unfortunate and, at bottom, inappropriate.

However, rather than reliving the missing arrest records issue further, my recommendation is to concentrate the city’s efforts on a prospective basis to prevent this from happening again – at least to the maximum extent possible. For example, the routine Friday (record) requests can be made 10 or 14 days in arrears rather than just seven days; hopefully, that will minimize the gap coverage on the close timing and filing of paper reports…And the city and individuals at the police department will have to re-double their efforts to make sure that both the rights of the persons in the system and the right of the public to access information made public by law are respected.

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