The article examines the N.C. Department of Public Safety’s refusal to provide redacted applications from the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Fund.
Elon University communications instructor Pate McMichael was featured in a recent News & Observer article examining North Carolina’s refusal to release detailed records about how the state compensates victims of violent crimes.
McMichael, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, told the newspaper that the decision reflects broader challenges surrounding government transparency and access to public records in the state.
“North Carolina is a state that’s going in the wrong direction big time when it comes to public records access,” McMichael said. “They’ve already made law enforcement records, criminal investigative records, nearly impossible to get, even when cases have been closed for long periods of time — cleared, as they would say.”
The article examines the N.C. Department of Public Safety’s refusal to provide redacted applications from the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Fund, which reimburses survivors of violent crimes and families of homicide victims for expenses including funerals, therapy and lost wages.
McMichael said withholding even redacted applications makes it more difficult for the public to evaluate how the state administers the program.
“These types of privacy restrictions are making it much harder for anybody to scrutinize what the government’s actually doing,” McMichael said. “It is very difficult to ascertain how they’re going about the process of deciding who gets compensation and who doesn’t, and by denying even redacted applications for these types of compensation, it’s much harder to see if there’s a bias in the system.”