http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/nyregion/de-blasio-faces-mounting-pressure-on-matters-of-transparency.html 2016-09-12 14:17:49 De Blasio Faces Mounting Pressure on Matters of Transparency An exchange on a radio program and a lawsuit filed this week marked an increase in tensions over his stance on police disciplinary records. === Mayor It was not to be. For about 10 minutes, the WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer hit Mr. de Blasio with a barrage of questions about secrecy and transparency, pressing him on his stance on police disciplinary records and his refusal to divulge certain emails and texts with outside advisers. The questions came after a lawsuit filed by organizations challenging the de Blasio administration over its denial of access to those communications. The radio exchange and the lawsuit, Exhibit A for critics is New York City’s Law Department, which is fighting multiple court battles to maintain the secrecy of city records of officers’ past misconduct and that of Mr. de Blasio’s own communications with outside advisers. “On the police records, I have a clear position that I want to see the state law changed and I want us to be able to release those records,” Mr. de Blasio told Mr. Lehrer, referring to a Defense and civil rights lawyers In federal court, city lawyers have gone so far as to request that an attorney’s letters be sealed or redacted, even after the settling of a case, if there was even the briefest mention of an officer’s disciplinary history. In state court, the city filed appeals to stop the disclosure of a summary of disciplinary records in the case of Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island officer who placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold in 2014, and also in the case of a Queens officer, Jason Maccaron, involved in a violent arrest. Joel Berger, a former city lawyer who represents plaintiffs with lawsuits against the police, said he detected a new approach. “The city has been doing it all along, but they’ve been doing it even more strenuously in this administration than in the previous one,” he said. (City officials denied any change.) The issue emerged for Mr. de Blasio last month after the Police Department’s decision to change a decades-old policy of posting certain disciplinary information on a clipboard in its public information office at Police Headquarters. The change, “For the past two years it’s become increasingly clear that the lack of accountability in police-involved deaths and other abuses is germane to the public interest,” Cynthia Conti-Cook, a staff attorney at Legal Aid, said. Erica Garner, Mr. Garner’s daughter, put it more bluntly on Twitter on Thursday, accusing the mayor in particularly curt language of caring about black lives only in a sexual context. The mayor insisted that the city had no choice but to defend the secrecy of the records until Albany acted to amend the law. As for the key outside advisers, Mr. de Blasio said, “when some individuals are very, very close advisers, that it is appropriate to have a private relationship with them.” Officials at City Hall have maintained for months that emails and texts with a select group of outside advisers — including those whose firms have clients with business before the city — can and should be kept from public view if they contain advice for the mayor of the sort that his top city aides would provide. (For emails to City Hall related to advisers’ clients, officials have said those records would be turned over when requested.) Mr. de Blasio’s position gained a kind of political infamy when in May his then-counsel, Maya Wiley, deemed the advisers “agents of the city.” Reporters have sought through Freedom of Information Act requests to pry open those records; NY1 and The New York Post began their court challenge this week. Zachary W. Carter, the city’s corporation counsel, said the city was trying to put “a legal framework on something that has existed since the beginning of time.” He said that “the appropriate line drawing is a challenge, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth the effort.” Mr. Carter added that, besides the common theme of transparency, the approach to the emails was not at all related to the city’s position on police records. “It’s apples and — forget oranges — it’s apples and elephants in terms of a legal issue,” he said.