[COMMENTARY] We are all taught that American government is supposed to be by and of the people. In short, government is supposed to be responsive to the people. But how can people demand accountability from government when the tools created to spread sunshine on the operations of those institutions, the people hired to run them and the politicians elected to oversee them are being eroded or removed?

Our tools of sunshine are the Freedom of Information Act and the Open Meetings Act. FOIA allows you as a citizen to retrieve documents about how the government does its jobs, and OMA demands that all decisions of elected officials be made in the open, in a public meeting with transparency.

Our right to spread a little sunshine, as one Broadway show tune says, has been eroded slowly and dangerously.

Last year the state legislature passed, and the governor signed, an amendment to FOIA that made it impossible for you as a citizen to retrieve statements of police officers involved in internal investigations. You know — internal investigations into charges such as corruption, shootings and brutality. What possible reason could you, as a citizen, have to need to know what the officers involved in taking drug money to turn a blind eye to crack houses said in those investigations, or what officers involved in the shooting of an unarmed citizen said, or what officers accused of brutally beating an African-American suspect in custody said? They are police officers; they would never lie, would they? We should just take the word of government that the investigations have been done, and the officers cleared of all wrong-doing.

Pay no attention to the internal documents that show otherwise!

Last month, Michigan State University, which has long touted its belief in a marketplace of ideas that is open and free, stood before the state’s high court and argued that students, parents and staff had no right to access police reports of incidents on the campus. Because certainly that marketplace is not served by knowing of bomb threats to student government meetings, or alleged rapes involving elected student officials, or discovering a pattern of break-ins at dorm rooms. Safety is always a matter of out of sight, out of mind. If you don’t know there is a rape and murder in a dorm room — as happened at Eastern Michigan University a couple of years ago and officials hid the crime for days — then your safety is just fine.

And just this month, the Fraternal Order of Police filed suit against the city of Lansing for releasing the contents of the employee file of a police officer involved in the fatal shooting of a fugitive. The FOP lawsuit claims the city was wrong to release that information to a local weekly in Lansing and seeks all copies of the file to be returned. It also seeks to end a provision of FOIA that allows those files to be released.

Continued – Certainly, your safety is not served by knowing the contents of the employment file of a police officer — you know things like citations for bravery, or at most, about complaints.

For over two years now, the State News, MSU’s student newspaper, has attempted to attend meetings and dinners held by MSU elected Trustees in the day prior to their public board meeting. All of the Trustees attend these meetings, and they discuss the agendas and issues for the next day’s meeting.

The reasoning behind this?

“You give yourself a chance to have candid conversations,” Trustee Colleen McNamara was quoted by the State News saying. “It gives me the chance to ask stupid, dumb questions without finding myself quoted in the paper the next day for asking a dumb question.”

Certainly, what right do we simple citizens have to see our elected officials asking questions and getting answers that help them deliberate and make decisions about how they spend our money? God forbid an elected official look “dumb.”

The fact of the matter is the MSU Board of Trustees is violating, if not the letter of the Open Meetings Act, certainly the spirit.

These laws are of great importance to me, not only as a journalist, but also as a citizen. Yes, I have filed court actions for violations of the Open Meetings Act. I have won some, and I have lost some. I have used FOIA to gain hundreds of thousands of pages of documents over the years, and those documents help me to write clearer stories for my readers, and they help make me a better informed consumer of information that is out there.

When I was a Trustee at Lansing Community College, these values led me to keep my fellow board members honest. I demanded, and, with no controversy, received support in making sure we followed not just the letter of the Open Meetings Act, but the spirit of it. I did so with FOIA as well. I did not hide behind semantics. I did not need to fear asking questions in board meetings for fear I might appear “dumb.”

The only dumb questions are those that are not asked.

The state is in a massive economic crisis. Many of our cities are battling internally to figure out how to pay legacy costs and fix our roads. As citizens, we have a need now, more than ever, to make sure the actions of government are taken in the light of day, and with complete transparency. We have a great need to know why a mayor of a large city suddenly shifts directions and agrees to pay out millions of dollars in a lawsuit. We need to know why our elected officials didn’t know that mayor made a secret deal to hide his affair, and his apparent lies in a court hearing, under oath.

McNamara may fear looking “dumb” for asking questions in public, but you know what? I would rather have an intellectually curious elected official who asks questions in public and holds fellow elected officials’ feet to the fire by making them discuss and deliberate policy and financial decisions that impact millions in taxpayer dollars. I would prefer those hired with taxpayer money bend over backward to get every piece of paper about every decision out in public for public consumption. I prefer those elected officials make the actions of criminals public knowledge, rather than letting criminals foray through our neighborhoods on petty criminal sprees until someone gets shot in the head because they stumbled in on a two-bit burglar in the act of taking their television. I would prefer to know what officers accused of taking bribes or other wrongdoing, or those involved in shootings, have said behind closed doors, when the television cameras and reporters are missing from the room. I want to know, as part of the checks and balances, that I am being told the truth.