ProPublica: Hate crimes data

Mr. Schwencke,

I am processing the request below on behalf of the city of Lincoln and plan to provide a response or explanation for a delayed response by Friday, July 14, 2017. Please contact me directly with any questions or to discuss further.

Abigail F. Littrell
Assistant City Attorney
555 S. 10th Street Suite 300
Lincoln, NE 68508
(402) 441-7263
alittrell@lincoln.ne.gov<mailto:alittrell@lincoln.ne.gov>

Subject: Nebraska Public Records Request: ProPublica: Hate crimes data

To: lpd@CJIS.LINCOLN.NE.GOV<mailto:lpd@CJIS.LINCOLN.NE.GOV>

Dear Mr. Schwencke,

You will find attached an Excel spreadsheet responsive to your public records request dated July 10, 2017. The attached document is compiled from data reported by the Lincoln Police Department (LPD) to the Nebraska Crime Commission and FBI. The spreadsheet contains fields for: the date of the incident; the victim type; the offense classification; a description (not address) of the location of the incident and; the bias motivation. I have attached two additional documents which are keys for the codes in columns C through G.

The attached document does not contain incident numbers. An initial review of this data revealed that at least one matter reported on the spreadsheet was later sealed by the court. Providing a case number could link the initial incident to individuals who later had their cases sealed and it is the City of Lincoln’s position that this would be a violation of Nebraska sealing statutes. It is my hope that the data, without a case number, is sufficient for your purposes. In order to produce case numbers, staff in the city attorney’s office will have to search each incident and cross reference to determine if the case was later sealed. Any sealed cases will then need to be redacted. I estimate the total time to perform that task will be 2-3 hours and will result in a less comprehensive data set than the attached spreadsheet. Nebraska statute allows municipalities to charge public records requestors city employees’ hourly rate for time spent responding to a request which exceeds four hours.

The number of victims, race of the victims, and gender of the victims are not reported to the NE crime commission or FBI and therefore that information is not presently gathered in a central database. In order to obtain that information, LPD staff will need to pull the associated reports for each incident and review those reports to determine if the responding officers documented the victim information you requested. LPD has provided a conservative estimate that this task would take 15 minutes per incident for a total of 43.25 hours. LPD advises me the task may take as long as 25 minutes depending on the complexity of the incidents and the number of officers responding to and reporting on the incidents. LPD’s Record Manager earns $36.935 per hour. The total cost for producing the additional information is estimated to be $1,449.69 (39.25x36.935). Please let me know by July 28, 2017 if you still wish to receive the victim and/or case number information discussed above and I will advise LPD and City Law staff to begin collecting the additional data.

Please contact me directly to discuss further or with any questions.
Regards,

Abigail F. Littrell
Assistant City Attorney
555 S. 10th Street Suite 300
Lincoln, NE 68508
(402) 441-7263
alittrell@lincoln.ne.gov<mailto:alittrell@lincoln.ne.gov>