From the Charlotte Observer (2/17/10): Mecklenburg County's online property records are a hit with residents trying to track bad landlords, delinquent taxpayers or home values.
But the county is considering stripping the site of one of its most easy-to-use features: searching by name.
Law enforcement officials worry that criminals seeking revenge could find police, prosecutors and judges.
Officials have cited no examples of that happening but worry enough to have written a letter of concern, signed by nearly a dozen local law enforcement officials, including police Chief Rodney Monroe and District Attorney Peter Gilchrist.
Now the county is asking the public through an online survey whether they support removing the “name search” function from Property Ownership and Land Records Information System site, better known as POLARIS.
The proposal means users would have to know either the street address or parcel ID for a property. That would allow them to find other information about the property, including the owner’s name.
The survey had drawn roughly 250 responses by Tuesday morning. The site is popular, drawing millions of page views and about 60,000 unique visitors each month.
Residents would still be able to take someone’s name to the county’s Register of Deeds or Tax Assessor offices and look up properties. But the ease of going online prompted law enforcement officials in August to ask the county to change its system.
“We understand that this web site was created with the best intentions of aiding those with legitimate purposes,” says the letter addressed to commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts. “However, the web site also is available to those with less-than-honorable purposes.”
They want the county to go further and remove names of law enforcement employees from the site altogether. They also urged the county to consider a similar service for victims or witnesses of crimes and judicial officers.
Across the nation, some states do scrub the names of law enforcement officials from their online property sites. Florida, for example, allows removal from public records of information such as home addresses or telephone numbers of current and former law enforcement personnel and crime victims.
But in order to do that in Mecklenburg, there would need to be a change in N.C. law, said Kurt Olmsted, director of the county’s Geospatial Information Services department, which runs the POLARIS site.
Roberts, the commissioners chair, said the proposed change could make it “just hard enough” to deter a casual criminal or others from using the site to do harm.
Some residents and public records advocates don’t like the idea of taking away the online name search.
“If they get rid of that, they might as well not even have (the Web site) because it’s completely worthless,” said Jeff Taylor, who writes the popular Meck Deck blog for the John Locke Foundation.
Taylor said the Web site helps promote openness and transparency within government, including letting people know who pays local taxes. He has used the site to look up information on delinquent taxpayers.
Taylor said he is worried about attempts to limit what records people can access online, including a decision months ago to remove the ability to get the full address online of someone who has been arrested.
Commissioner Dumont Clarke, who chairs the board’s criminal justice committee, said he believes in “making public records available to the public in as easy a way to use as possible.” But he said commissioners seek the “delicate balance” between protecting members of law enforcement and making public records available through the Internet.
Parry Aftab, executive director of online safety and education group WiredSafety, said governments should do what they can to help keep people safe, and that could mean looking at more records than just the property Web site. For example, she said court filings could contain credit card or other potentially compromising data.
Aftab said she thinks the county’s idea is a good first step. “I think it shows a sensitivity of people within government recognizing how much personal information about their residence can be provided online and how much they facilitate how much of that information is online.”
But Jane Kirtley, a University of Minnesota media eithics and law professor who studies digitized government information, said governments shouldn’t limit access to public records on the chance it could be used for ill intent. Instead, she said governments should punish the illegal behavior.
“There really is no government information that could not be misused, that could not be used to commit a crime in some way,” Kirtley said. “So if that’s your basis for cutting off information, then you’re basically gutting public records laws.”
by April Bethea, Charlotte Observer Staff Writer