A defense attorney says in a new lawsuit that the Metropolitan Police Department maintained a “watchlist” of lawyers, activists, and reporters whose requests for public records would be subjected to additional scrutiny, delayed, or outright denied as a means to stop critical or embarrassing revelations from coming to light.

According to the lawsuit — which was filed on on Wednesday night in federal court on behalf of attorney Amy Phillips — the “unofficial, unwritten policy” was instituted under former Police Chief Peter Newsham in order to limit the release of information that “may lead to criticism of the department.” It also allegedly served to prevent him from being “blindsided” by questions based on records obtained through requests under under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, which allows anyone to request public documents from government agencies.

Phillips says in the lawsuit that she learned of the watchlist and the unofficial policy from Vendette Parker, a former FOIA officer with MPD who was charged with managing it. Parker, who retired from MPD in 2020, told Phillips that the watchlist included reporters Eric Flack from WUSA9 and Marina Marraco from Fox 5, as well as Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Denise Rucker Krepp and Anthony Lorenzo Green. The list also included Phillips herself, as well as other defense attorneys, and others.

The additional scrutiny was allegedly also applied to any requests for records from the controversial Gun Recovery Unit, personnel records, Newsham’s emails, use of force records, any paperwork related to the internal disciplinary process known as adverse actions, and more.

In an interview with DCist/WAMU, Phillips says the apparent existence of such a watchlist would violate the spirit, if not the letter of the city’s open-records law.

“The reason we have the Freedom of Information Act is because members of the public, whether they’re journalists or lawyers or ANC commissioners or just someone who lives in D.C. and wants to know what their tax dollars are being spent on, have the right to request a broad amount of information from basically any agency,” she said.

“If there are agencies that are picking and choosing based on viewpoint who to give that information to, it means that the political process isn’t working the way that it’s supposed to, because people who are friendly to the police department are getting access to information that they can use to advocate for their interests while people that MPD perceives as being unfriendly to them don’t have access to the information that they would need in order to make a case for reforms that we think are necessary,” she added.

According to the lawsuit, Parker says the policy was overseen by Leann Turner, the department’s chief operating officer. (Turner remains in that position.) Parker estimates that in the two years she worked in the FOIA office, MPD “delayed, denied, or improperly altered” 20 FOIA requests under the policy — including records requested by Phillips on a disciplinary matter involving a police officer who was later fired.

Another instance took place in early 2019, when the ACLU of D.C. requested six months worth of stop-and-frisk data from MPD. (A 2016 D.C. law required this data to be proactively made public, but MPD only started complying in late 2019 after being sued.) In the lawsuit, Parker says that “because the records had the potential to result in significant public criticism of MPD,” she was instructed to find a way not to disclose the records. The department ultimately settled on asking the ACLU to make a multi-million payment to access the records. (Agencies are allowed to charge fees to produce records requested under FOIA, but they need to be reasonable.)

Similar obstacles were allegedly thrown in Fox 5 reporter Marraco’s way in 2018, when she requested a police report detailing an incident where a staffer in Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office was involved in a drunken brawl in the Wilson Building. MPD gave Marraco a heavily redacted version of the report, while she was able to obtain an unredacted version separately from a police station.

“Requesters on the watchlist always at least experience a delay in their requests while the department prepares for any criticism that may result,” says the lawsuit, which asks a federal judge to order MPD to treat all FOIA requests the same. “On some occasions, requesters are subject to fees that others don’t need to pay. And on other occasions, requesters simply don’t get the information they are entitled to.”

Parker says she never reported the unofficial policy to the office of D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, which defends D.C. agencies when they are sued for not complying with FOIA, because she felt “intimidated” by Newsham, who she says took “retributive action” against her for speaking up about another incident.

Though the policy was started under Newsham, who left in 2020 to lead the Prince William County Police Department, the lawsuit says Police Chief Robert Contee “has not ended or suspended the policy.”

In response to a request for comment, Newsham referred a reporter to MPD. In an email, Kristen Metzger, an MPD spokesperson, said that while the department doesn’t discuss specific allegations made in lawsuits, it would investigate the claims made in Phillips’ lawsuit.

“We do acknowledge the serious nature of the claims. Transparency with our community partners is necessary to maintaining trust and agency accountability. A thorough review of the assertions will be completed and appropriately acted upon,” she wrote.

According to D.C. data, MPD receives more FOIA requests than almost any other city agency. From Oct. 2019 to Sept. 2020, the most recent period for which data is available, MPD received 1,612 FOIA requests, representing 16% of all FOIA requests to city agencies that year. Almost 20,000 hours were spent responding to those requests.

This isn’t the first lawsuit targeting the city’s compliance with FOIA. In 2018, Genet Amare, a FOIA officer at the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs — which gets the second-highest number of FOIA requests after MPD — filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing her bosses of interfering with public records requests. The case was settled in late 2020.

Fritz Mulhauser, a civil rights attorney and co-chair of the legal committee of the D.C. Open Government Coalition, says Phillips’ allegations have to be investigated — and call for a strengthening of the D.C. Office of Open Government, which was created in part to ensure consistent compliance with FOIA laws.

“The allegations of an MPD policy targeting FOIA requesters for different treatment based on their identity or past use of records to criticize the police department are deeply troubling and undermine public faith in MPD,” he said. “We hope they prompt full investigation and full, public disclosure of the results. Public records are public, period. The allegations also highlight the need, as our D.C. Open Government Coalition has argued, to strengthen the Office of Open Government so it has the full authority to look at FOIA problems and assure the law is respected.”