In the article, Simon discusses how the police in Baltimore were constantly trying to find ways to suppress information from the public on incidents reports, which are by law public record. He goes on to talk about how they've recently changed policy to keep the names of officers involved in shootings confidential, and how that not only breaks the longstanding laws, but also thwarts the system of checks and balances of power ensured by keeping such information available to the public.
It's very much relevant to what's going on with the SCMPD's attempts to obscure public access to their incident reports.
I like the bit in there about calling the Judge's home phone when he needed to cops to hand something over. For a minute there in Savannah during the Snitch days the SCMPD decided that they wouldn't give us incident reports, which were the foundation of our publicaiton. We were then tipped off to a "good cop" who would use his online access to the reports to print out all the incident data and leave it secret-agent style behind a trash can near the precinct offices. Atlanta also came under a lot of fire for fudging crime data in the run-up to the Olympics.
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