Government - You have a right to know what your government is doing

Herald:" Jorge Morales had every reason to feel blessed on this night. He'd become a father just the day before and was excited about his wife and newborn coming home. He also had the love of his 5-year-old stepdaughter, Dalia, whom he was taking for an evening walk in the Allapattah section of Miami after eating at McDonald's. That's when Morales was shot dead. I remember he said, Run, honey run! And grabbed me and took me to the ground, Dalia Roman recalled. I remember he was covered with blood. I was covered with blood. I was crying and kicking and screaming when they took me away. Morales was struck in the head by one of 59 bullets fired by two cops that night. Two bullets entered the spine of an alleged robber running from the police. The other 56 ended up inside nearby homes, cars, fence gates, the McDonald's. At least one other bystander was wounded. They shot everywhere. They didn't care, a witness said of the cops. How did The News-paper come to know all this? Because of freedom of information laws that enable the public to access even the most sensitive documents of public agencies and governments, in this case ballistics reports prepared by internal investigators. And it mattered. The newspaper's investigation into what was then a trigger-happy Miami Police Department responsible for numerous deliberate and accidental killings and injuries. Another would hide information gathered in an investigation into a law-enforcement officer's actions. Sounds harmless enough, until you realize that The News-paper's ability to ferret out the wild-West behavior of several Miami cops could have been blocked had this proposal been the law. Our common enemy is apathy. We worry that most Americans won't notice, or worse, won't care, as their right to know what their government is doing slips away. This is no idle threat. A recent Knight Foundation survey of more than 100,000 high-school students found that nearly 75 percent had little understanding of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press, of religion, of assembly and of the right to petition government to redress grievances. More alarming, more than a third believe that the First Amendment goes too far. And high-school students aren't alone. The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black paid homage to Madison in 1971 when he concluded an opinion by writing, ``And paramount among the duties of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell....Or, perhaps, to die of trigger-happy cops at home. I read this and it really made me scared, like this parent he was just doing a normal thing with his child and because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time he's dead. So What I need to ask when is or where is the safe place to be and at the right time?...ALSO, did you read the last to line's? Remember what they said. If not read them again, does Iraqi come to mind?"