Charlotte police may soon get out of the pad-and-pen traffic accident reporting routine as they shift to a N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles software program that should do the job faster and better. This change may invoke a federal law which stipulates that once a state receives motor vehicle-related info, the state must keep it secret. Yet accident reports have always been publicly available information.
Confused? Join the club.
Let’s back up and not lose sight of the big picture. First, it is very good news that police can file accident reports more efficiently. Such record-keeping is a necessity of police work, but it is not the primary reason we put police officers on the streets. Keeping cops from doing cleric work is pretty close to an absolute good.
Second, although it is very industrious of them, the fact that some private businesses make use of accident reports as a source of business leads is no reason to keep the current software-less system. Governments, least of all public safety officers, do not exist to serve as a marketing adjunct for doctors, lawyers, or collision repair shops. If such entities can make use of otherwise publicly available information, great, but they have no special claim to it.
No, the reason we make accident reports public, along with police arrest logs and all manner of civil and criminal court proceedings, including routine real estate transactions, is that citizens have a presumptive right to know what their government and its agents are up to. That interest is balanced by the understanding that truly personal information that might facilitate identity theft or other types of fraud will be scrubbed from public records.
For that reason, although buying a house will get your name on all kinds of mailing lists for goods and services, no one is running loose with your Social Security number. The simple fact is that participating in modern society means giving up if not your privacy, certainly any illusion of anonymity. Somebody out there knows who you are.
But it was the fear that the wrong kind of somebody could use motor vehicle information that spurred the federal law against handing out such info to the general public. A few well-publicized cases of stalkers and criminals getting easy access to personal info from state databases stampeded Congress into action when it passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act in 1994.
The law mandated that the states not disclose drivers’ personal information including their names and addresses to any non-governmental third party, with the exception of licensed private investigators. Information regarding accidents and traffic violations was not supposed to held secret, however. The state of South Carolina challenged the law all the way to the Supreme Court in 2000, but was beaten back when the court invoked the handy-dandy commerce clause as a justification for the federal involvement in a traditionally state-level matter.
It is now up to state Attorney General Roy Cooper to navigate all of this law talk and craft a policy for the DMV to follow. On the face of it, he might argue that as accident reports are not actually a DMV-produced record, they fall outside the scope of the federal law. Or he could play it safe and declare that DMV’s involvement means that identifying info like names and addresses on accident reports must be scrubbed clean before release.
That latter path, of course, would render the accident reports useless as a source of business leads. Then again, it appears that licensed private investigators could act as middlemen and harvest the reports for doctors, lawyers, and the like and still be in compliance with the spirit of the law, which recognizes legitimate business uses for the motor vehicle info. Or perhaps that that option prove too costly or iffy. We may soon find out.
In fact, it may turn out that Congress will need to revisit their law to make clear that advances in technology will not create an altogether new class of restricted information. We also need to understand that everyone is naked in an informational sense today, and there is no turning back.
It might make sense to have a wall around millions and millions of state-administered and generated driving records just for the simple fact that they present such a tempting data-mining target to those with mischief on their minds. But even Congress acting in perfect concert with state and local officials cannot erect a fool-proof wall around all personal information that is a product of living in a modern, information-dependent society.