The Appellate Division recently held that the “crash investigation report” that police officers must file after investigating a motor vehicle accident may be withheld from disclosure under OPRA’s exemption for investigations in progress. North Jersey Media v. Tp. of Nutley.

Although the opinion is unpublished, and therefore not precedential, it involves an issue not previously addressed under OPRA–the alleged conflict between NJSA 47:1A-3a, which allows records to be withheld while an investigation is in progress, and NJSA 39:4-131, which says that motor vehicle accident reports are public records. In this case, the Essex Prosecutor initially denied an OPRA request for a crash report, because the Prosecutor’s Office was still investigating the accident. When it completed its investigation, it released the crash report. The requestor, relying on NJSA 39:4-131, argued that the crash report should have been immediately disclosed, despite the pending investigation.

The Appellate Division rejected this argument, on the basis that the more recent OPRA provision, granting confidentiality where release of an investigatory record will be inimical to the public interest, superseded the older Title 39 statute.

This result is clearly correct. In fact, in my view, the requestor’s argument is frivolous. The whole point of NJSA 47:1A-3a is to provide confidentiality to government records that otherwise must be disclosed, to avoid jeopardizing an ongoing investigation. Yet under the requestor’s argument, this provision would be meaningless, and agencies would have to disclose records even when to do so would be detrimental to the public interest.