For use Sunday, March 14

Keep 911 Tapes On Record

On Jan. 17, 2008, a 21-year-old mother of two was abducted from her North Port home in Sarasota County. Denise Amber Lee was a bound captive in the backseat of a green Camaro driven by Michael King.

There were five 911 calls made to emergency dispatchers about that abduction — including one from Denise Amber Lee, who died that day, pleading for help.

King was convicted of murder; flaws were found in the way the calls were handled, and the way the countywide 911 system was set up.

Listening to those calls is still heart-wrenching for Denise’s in-laws, Peggy and Mark Lee.

Yet they are fighting a bill in Tallahassee that would exempt those calls from Florida’s Public Records Law. Legislators say they want to protect the victims’ families from the trauma of having to relive the moment every time television or radio stations replay the call.

“We’re almost disgusted with it,” Peggy Lee said of Tallahassee’s attempt to seal the records. “We just don’t want to see any more people die,” she told The Palm Beach Post.

Under a proposal by Rep. Rob Schenk, R-Spring Hill, 911 calls would be released only in the form of transcripts, and then only after at least 60 days since the time of the call had elapsed. The person who wants to read the transcript would also have to pay to have it complied.

Transcripts lack details

A transcript isn’t enough, said Kevin Willett, a California-based former emergency dispatcher who now trains 911 workers throughout the country and uses such tapes for training sessions.

A transcript “doesn’t convey voice inflection,” Willett told the newspaper. “It doesn’t show that there were gaps and a pause of 30 seconds. … We’ve used the Lee tape outside of Florida and it’s impactful. Now, Florida’s basically shutting off the spigot.”

But House Speaker Larry Cretul is alarmed and saddened by the rebroadcasts, said Jill Chamberlain, his spokeswoman. “He knows people whose families … suffered terrible tragedies and he just thinks it’s totally inappropriate.”

She went on to say that if the “broadcast media could be implored to exercise self-restraint, that would be one thing. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that that’s happening.”

Lee’s parents have a different take, however. Peggy Lee said television and radio stations “have been very kind” about respecting her requests to keep recordings off the air.

While legislators say the bill will still allow dispatching mistakes to be uncovered and reported, Gov. Charlie Crist said he was “concerned about it” and preferred “transparency, openness in government. It’s the people’s government, they have a right to see it all.”

How the bill came about

He’s exactly right in supporting transparency, noted Barbara Petersen, president of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, which backs open-government laws: “There is no opportunity to hold emergency services accountable without having access to these tapes.”

As it turns out, this bill isn’t the result of a groundswell of Florida families who feel their privacy has been invaded by the replaying of 911 calls. It appears to have arisen because one man had the ear of House Speaker Cretul, the Ocala Republican whose district includes the headquarters of the Florida Farm Bureau — 140,000 members strong.

The president of the bureau is John Hoblick, who was out of town May 30 when Jake, his 16-year-old son, died at the family home in DeLeon Springs. A friend of Jake’s told investigators they were playing drinking games and experimenting with prescription drugs such as oxycodone into the early morning hours, the St. Petersburg Times reported last week.

Hoblick’s eldest son, John Jr., 20, found his brother unresponsive and not breathing. He made the call to 911, which lasted about a minute. Jake’s father said he heard the call broadcast the next day on television. “There’s no reason to exploit someone that way,” he told the Times.

In an interview last week, Cretul said Hoblick approached him at a Florida Chamber of Commerce event in Orlando about closing the records. Hoblick said he later met with Cretul: “Speaker Cretul said, ‘John, we’ll get it done.’ ”

In the interest of fairness and continual improvement of emergency systems, Cretul should also lend an ear to those who believe it is in the best interest of the public that those recordings remain readily available for all to examine.

Reproduced courtesy of The Lakeland Ledger
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