In 2022, Montana’s policing regulators at the Public Safety Officers Standards and Training Council, or POST, received a request for basic information that the board had released before: the names of the law enforcement officers that POST certifies to work in Montana, and their public employers.
It’s simple data that most states around the country release. Montana, up until that point, counted itself among them, having provided the data to journalists at least twice before: In 2017 to a reporter with the Scripps News Washington Bureau, and in 2019 to Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based journalism nonprofit.
However, this new request, from a reporter with the Associated Press, was different. Not because the content or context of the request were significantly different, but because the political environment at POST had undergone seismic shifts.