There’s a public outlash lately about police agencies releasing 911 tapes. Whether it’s the Demi Moore call nationally or the call of a Rockford teen trying to get help after driving into a pond near Ottoville locally, people are expressing their outrage and demanding for new laws to block the release of emergency call tapes.

Take a deep breath and think about the consequences first. This is all about accountability.

I am not a coldhearted jerk of a journalist, although I’ve been called that when The Lima News and LimaOhio.com decided it was in the public’s interest to share 911 calls and police videos in the past. I’ve seen and head things I wish I hadn’t over my years in journalism, things that trouble me sometimes. I’ve taken my share of heat from the public and coworkers alike when we’ve decided the public needed to hear for themselves what happened. It’s not a decision we take lightly, but no one ever said telling a community the truth was easy.

At least in Ohio, 911 calls are a public record. Often, they’re the best way to clear up a discrepancy in how people remember a call happening. So often, we journalists hear people complaining about how they were treated by authorities. The 911 call or a videotape of a police stop are among the few ways we can all hear for ourselves what happened and judge the truth.

Through having these records public, we’ve discovered holes in the system in the past. We’ve found dispatchers with incomplete maps. We’ve found people who don’t believe the imminent danger of a situation. Frankly, we’ve found a lot of rudeness on both sides of the phone. Quite a few times, we’ve found people verbally abusing the hard-working professionals who answer our emergency calls.

In the case of the Ottoville incident, we decided there wasn’t anything on that tape that hadn’t been adequately described through our coverage of the tape. There was no discrepancy in accounts of this heart-breaking story, nothing to hear from listening to her terrified voice in a life-or-death situation. If you feel otherwise, we respect your right to listen.

If you take away these 911 public records as a whole, you lose one of the public’s ways of being a watchdog against its own police agencies. The ability to get these helps the public expose potential abuse down the road. And make no mistake about it, this is about the public. You have just as much right to request a 911 call as any journalist does.

And yes, some journalists may make an unpopular decision to share these calls in a difficult time for a family. We may not all agree on the decision. But that’s a First Amendment issue, their right to share things we don’t want to hear. At that point, you can exercise your First Amendment right to say you don’t like it, but none of us should ever cross that line into censorship.

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