Cloudy conditions for Sunshine Week: A pile of paper instead of a spreadsheet

For an ongoing series on race in Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS investigative reporter Katie Wilcox requested five years of records from six cities on when police stop people for suspicious behavior and other reasons.

Grand Junction provided information from its field interviews at no charge. Pueblo billed Wilcox $20, Colorado Springs asked for $88 and Fort Collins quoted her $60. Denver doesn’t keep the data by race.

Aurora’s price? $290.85. And that’s for 1,151 printed pages from a database. Not an Excel spreadsheet like Wilcox received from other cities. If she wants to inspect all 22,309 reports, she’ll have to pay the city $111,510.40 to cover the cost of copies and the redaction of any confidential information. Continue…

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