Keep 911 records open 

Sometimes government does things right. Other times, it screws up and tragically sometimes people die because of those failures.

Now, Rep. Amy Sue Vruwink of Milladore, wants to make it harder for people to find out about the screw-ups that cost peoples lives. She is championing a bill which would close the door on recordings of 911 calls and limit public access to transcripts of those calls.

The call to limit public access comes as fallout from the case of Brittany Zimmermann, a Marshfield native who was murdered in her apartment in Madison while attending school there in 2008. News organization in the state sued to obtain recordings of her 911 calls to Madison police after learning that dispatchers had hung up on her and never sent law enforcement even though there were obvious sounds of a struggle. The resulting political repercussions resulted in a major shakeup of the Madison police and additional scrutiny of dispatchers and how they handle calls throughout the state.

The hope in reporting on the calls is that lessons learned from the failure will result in lives being saved in the future. Of course, that assumes anyone learns or can verify what happened, rather than simply relying on those who have the most to lose if it comes to light to police themselves.

The idea of needing to have watchdogs making sure government is not hiding things isnt anything new. The Romans even had a phrase for it Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? which translates into Who watches the watchmen?

In America, the solution has been to put ultimate authority in the hands of the people. However, as the saying goes garbage in garbage out and without accurate information on which to base opinions, the electorate is nothing more than an unruly mob that can be swayed by fast talkers and con artists. It is the job of the news media to provide that accurate information, to lift the rocks to see what is squirming underneath and to put the full light of day on the actions and activities of government at all levels. This is sometimes not a pleasant job and as with many corrective measures it sometimes causes some short term pain for what is hopefully a long term good.

The job of a dispatcher is not an easy one. It is stressful and every day they work long hours serving as the last lifeline for those in need. Occasionally, the good they do is made public the heartwarming stories of the dispatcher who helped a small child save the life of his mother and similar tales, but more often it is when there are mistakes made that media attention focuses on them. That may seem unfair, but people are supposed to do their jobs and government agencies are supposed to work and when you make a cry for help, someone is supposed to respond.

Vruwinks crusade against public access to 911 recordings is couched in the language of protecting the families of victims of crimes from being re-victimized and that media release of the recordings serves only to sensationalize the crimes.

Vruwinks bill is another step toward the nanny state where anything that might make people uncomfortable is automatically labeled as bad and put away out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes people need to be uncomfortable in order to make things right.

Instead of leaving it up to the readers and viewers of these reports to draw their conclusions, Vruwink and those who follow her, would have us march merrily down the road to total government control of what we should think and what we should know.

Let us hope wiser heads prevail in the state legislature and that Vruwinks proposal to limit access to public records ends up in a recycling bin where it belongs.