A reporter asked for body-camera footage. UW-Madison police threatened her with a fine.

A hands-on encounter with Wisconsin’s newest and most troublesome open-records law.

On the morning of May 1, dozens of police officers from multiple agencies—UW-Madison Police Department, Madison Police Department, Dane County Sheriff’s Office, Wisconsin State Patrol, State Capitol Police—assembled on Library Mall to break up UW-Madison’s pro-Palestine encampment and arrest peaceful protestors. 

Before police escalated this into a full-scale kettle assault, Tone Madison’s Scott Gordon noticed that several of the MPD officers on the scene were wearing body cameras. This was only a couple of weeks into MPD’s 90-day body camera pilot, and Library Mall is not in MPD’s North District (the officers must have been on loan), so this was something of a novel sight. The UWPD officers present also had body cameras, which was less surprising, as that department has used body cameras for nine years. Regardless of department, it’s likely that body-camera footage will play a key role in any criminal prosecutions stemming from that day, and in the public narrative about the crackdown.

Tone Madison filed open-records requests with both MPD and UWPD, seeking their body-camera footage from the morning of May 1. Alice Herman, a Madison-based journalist who contributed extensively to Tone Madison and currently works as a US correspondent for The Guardian, volunteered to help us with these requests because she’s a great colleague and friend. (She’s done paid freelance work for us before, but insisted on taking this on pro bono.) What ensued was very illustrative of what life looks like with and without Act 253, a new Wisconsin state law that allows law enforcement agencies to charge redaction fees when processing public requests for audio and video material.

A City of Madison ordinance currently forbids city agencies, including MPD, from charging redaction fees. (Based on our previous reporting, it’s clear that MPD Chief Shon Barnes would like to remove that obstacle.) So for now, MPD can’t take advantage of Act 253. MPD got back to Herman within a week. The department’s records custodians asked for a grand total of $5.50 to cover the cost of a 32-gigabyte thumb drive containing the video files. (Postage would have been an extra dollar, but Herman picked it up in person.) We haven’t had enough time to scour the footage or determine whether there’s anything useful in here. One file largely consists of an MPD officer handing out Gatorade to the other cops on the scene. But as records requests go, this was pretty painless.

UWPD records staff initially wrote back to let Herman know they’d received the request and would be in touch. A few days after that, UWPD sent over a reply explaining that the department was already taking advantage of Act 253 to charge redaction fees, and implicitly threatening Herman with a fine should she share the footage with Tone Madison for a story:

Under this legislation, individuals requesting such footage may be subject to charges for redactions. Notably, exemptions from redaction fees are granted only to individuals who meet specific criteria, including not intending to use the content for financial gain and having made fewer than 10 requests in the calendar year. It’s essential to highlight those exemptions do not apply to media outlets or news stations. 

I see that two individuals from Tone Madison are cc’d on this correspondence [note: Alice CC’d me and Christina Lieffring, Tone Madison‘s News and Politics Editor, on her initial request email], so I wanted to clarify if you are affiliated as a contributor with Tone Madison, or if you are just an outside party requesting the footage? If you are an outside party requesting footage, and this will not be used for a story on a media outlet, then under this legislation, we will require you to fill out a form certifying that you would not use this footage for financial gain. By signing this, you agree to use this only for personal use. If you end up sending it to Tone Madison to use on their website or social media platforms, you will be in violation of that certification, in which you may be charged a $10,000 fine. 

This was alarming for three key reasons. One—and we cannot stress this enough—staff at government agencies do not typically threaten open-records requesters with a massive, punitive fine right off the bat. Two, it is perfectly legal to share a public record with a media outlet. And, in this context, we are talking about video footage that UWPD would eventually deem fit for public release after redactions, not leaked state secrets. Three, it is wildly disingenuous to conflate members of the news media with people simply out for financial gain. 

Herman and I both expressed our disappointment with this response. I ended up having a conversation with UWPD spokesperson Marc Lovicott, who apologized and acknowledged that it wasn’t appropriate to threaten a records requester with a fine. This at least brought the temperature down a bit. Still, it was clear that UWPD planned to stick with its overall interpretation of the law. We are still trying to sort out just how to proceed with UWPD. At this point, whether or not we at Tone Madison get ahold of the footage we requested—and whether or not we’ll need to pay a hefty fee for the privilege—seems less important than making UWPD explain the reasoning behind its stiff interpretation of this new and vaguely worded law.

But here’s the thing: Even UWPD, a law enforcement agency, doesn’t have a clear understanding of what this law, which it is enforcing, means. Don’t take my word for it! “It’s a broadly worded law that’s really untested. We’re all trying to figure it out,” Lovicott told Madison journalist and Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president Bill Lueders in a recent column about the law. Lueders mentions Tone Madison’s run-in with UWPD specifically in the piece. Lovicott pointed out that we run displays recognizing our sponsors on the site, “so they’re technically taking money in,” he told Lueders. “Is that financial gain?” 

This is a question UWPD’s own media spokesperson should be able to answer with confidence, given that UWPD’s own records staff is simultaneously telling us that media outlets are not exempt from the law’s “financial gain” provision. It’s also just a hilarious question to ask about a small outlet that barely scrapes by on donations, grants, and sponsorships, with an underpaid tiny part-time staff and a devoted team of freelancers. Sadly, we can confirm first-hand that filing public-records requests and running a tiny media outlet is not the cash cow the authors of Act 253 might imagine it to be.

As we gradually work on follow-up coverage about the law at Tone Madison, Alice Herman and Scott Gordon sat down to discuss it in greater detail.

Why we requested UWPD’s body-camera footage

Alice Herman: I’ve been wanting to do more public records work. And I think at some point, we got in touch about doing that for Tone Madison. 

Scott Gordon: Yeah, because we had some ideas for stories that would require public records requests, but because we’re always spread thin, nobody had had the time to put these things together. So it was clear we needed to ask somebody to help us, preferably somebody who was a knowledgeable journalist. I forget how exactly that conversation went down, but you agreed to spend some time doing that for us, despite having it sounds like a really full plate.

Alice Herman: But this specific request, how did it come about?

Scott Gordon: When I was at the Library Mall encampment on May 1, when the cops came in and broke it up, I noticed that there were Madison Police Department officers down there who were wearing body cameras. There was a small contingent of MPD cops, and at that point it was just two or three weeks into the body camera pilot program that MPD is doing. So seeing MPD officers with body cameras was still kind of a new sight. I was surprised to see them at Library Mall on campus because the pilot program is happening in the North District of MPD. Maybe some of these people were sent from North District as reinforcements. The UW-Madison police were the main agency running the show on campus, of course, so they had a much larger presence of officers, and of course, they had body cameras. UWPD started using body cameras in 2014. They were the first agency, first law enforcement agency in Dane County to adopt them. MPD and Dane County Sheriff are behind much of the rest of the state in adopting body cameras. 

I realized that this incident might end up being a real test of body cameras in Madison, especially for MPD because it’s so new, and a test of how police agencies would handle records requests, and how police agencies and prosecutors might end up using footage in the criminal cases that are coming out of the protests. I know from being there that police are pushing this very generalized narrative that isn’t true—”Well, we were trying to just remove the tents, and unfortunately, some protesters became violent.” Chief Barnes from MPD sent this absolutely ridiculous memo to the Common Council about all the things that MPD supposedly did to de-escalate that day, like, “Well, our officers didn’t have helmets along with the rest of their riot gear, and that was our way of de-escalating things.” They still sent people in riot gear to these protests. It was just ridiculous.

You and I have been through seeing a protest firsthand, and seeing the violence go down, and then seeing immediately how it gets shaped into these narratives that are either flatly not true, or that are distorted and kind of paint everybody with a broad brush.

Alice Herman: To go back to our experience covering a handful of protests in 2020, where there was oftentimes a very small group of young people marching, I think at one point violating a curfew. At least the handful of protests that we covered, I think it was mostly peaceful. There might have been people smashing stuff up. You’d have a protest, and then just disproportionate numbers of riot cops entering and riling people up but also shooting rubber bullets and spraying all of downtown with a mist of tear gas. It’s a very violent response. You can agree or disagree with tactics that protesters use, but the response is often disproportionate. 

When police respond as though they were dispersing a riot, the perception of the protest tends to change. The public is more likely to view a protest as violent when cops crack down. For that reason, and also because cops who are cracking down on people exercising their right to assemble should be held accountable, it’s really important for us to have a record of what happened. Being able to access body camera footage, at least in theory, would be one way of establishing some kind of record.

I actually did not cover the encampment at UW. But from what I read, there was quite a disproportionate response from riot police trying to disperse a crowd of people who were literally camping out. This was not a riot. I don’t know if I missed something. From what I understand it was a bunch of college students in tents.

Scott Gordon: College students, and community members, and a fair amount of faculty, and some university staff people. They were using a tactic of civil disobedience. The university says, “We have to remove these tents, based on these rules,” and some of the protestors decided to defend the tents. They were peaceful in doing that. There’s this whole collapsing of events that happens: “Well, these people were pushing up against the cops or hitting them or trying to grab their batons.” Well, OK, at that point, the cops have surrounded you. They’re right there. You’re gonna either push back to try to keep yourself upright or what? Just fall to the ground and get stepped all over? The stuff that we were seeing was ridiculous. If this was over tents, go around, hand out tickets and fines. You don’t need to send dozens of people in. 

Alice Herman: This is a perfect example of why one might be curious about that footage. And why, if body cameras really are a tool for transparency, they would be perhaps useful right now.

Scott Gordon: UWPD was painting with too broad a brush and saying “Unfortunately, protestors got violent with the police,” when, by and large, that was not true.

Alice Herman: It just illustrates that when a crowd of militarized cops in riot gear descend on a group of people, that doesn’t deescalate a situation.

Scott Gordon: No! So we decided to ask for footage from MPD and UWPD to see if it will give us any insight into what happened. I have no idea what’s gonna happen with people who are facing actual criminal charges, or the people that they slapped with citations after the fact, which is kind of hilarious, but clearly body-cam footage is going to play a role in all of this at some point.

Getting MPD’s footage from May 1

Alice Herman: Side note: Have you watched the MPD footage that they gave us?

Scott Gordon: I’ve started skimming through it. I haven’t gotten to really pay close attention to it. I think there might have been a pretty small number of MPD people with cameras that day. l’m not sure what all it’s going to tell us. There’s one video that is mostly just from the point of view of an officer who’s going around handing out Gatorade to the other cops. There’s a lot of cops standing around looking bored which is apparently mostly what they do generally on the job. I guess you could debate all day about what the actual use of this footage is even when it comes to getting a basic understanding of events. 

Alice Herman: But for the record, MPD, not to shower praise on the good cops of Madison, Wisconsin—as a proud Madison liberal, I love them—

[Both of us are laughing very hard here]

Alice Herman: Cut that!

Scott Gordon: I was walking around the other day and saw one of the MPD cars with the pride wrap!

Alice Herman: And you felt proud. A proud, Madisonian moment. They’ve changed. No. But just to illustrate the constraints that different departments are operating under with regards to this new statute, MPD got us the records very quickly. I assume that they had been requested before because they came very, very quickly. It might have taken them a week, but they were prompt. 

What is “financial gain,” anyway?

Alice Herman: Meanwhile, UWPD sent us this weird wishy-washy email low-key threatening to fine me $10,000. 

Scott Gordon: That was so strange on so many levels. The idea that somebody fielding an open-records request looks up the people that are CCed on the email, and tries to find out what they’re about and what they’re doing, and tries to assess what they might want to do with the records, and then making decisions based on that, is dangerous.

Alice Herman: The exemptions provision of the law is where shit gets really weird, in my opinion: “If the requester is an individual, if the requester provides certification to the authority that the requester will not use the audio or video content for…” [dramatic pause]

Scott Gordon: Financial gain!

Alice Herman: “…not including an award of damages in a civil action…”

Scott Gordon: We are having this conversation on top of a pile of money we made from being journalists. What a brilliant scheme.

Alice Herman: Let the record show that we really hacked the system. As a volunteer contributor, I stand to gain financially when I request materials from the UW-Madison Police Department. OK, and also critical: “any individual providing a false certification under this subdivision shall be subject to forfeiture of $10,000 for each violation,” which is a very specific penalty. It really puts the burden on the requester, which runs counter, in my mind, to the spirit of transparency in open-records law.

Scott Gordon: I still haven’t found any other example of an open-records law in the US that creates that kind of punishment. 

Alice Herman: ​​It’s so over the top. Let’s say I hadn’t CCed you and Christina. Let’s say I was not a reporter, and I had no affiliation with any news outlet, and I requested it as an individual, and I wasn’t going to sell it to anybody, and I went online, and I posted it for all the world to see, and then every news outlet in the state picked it up. It’s not clear to me how that’s different from a reporter whose job it is to provide this information to the public requesting it directly.

Scott Gordon: If it got out there through some other private requester just slapping it online, then anybody could use it, and the horse would be out of the barn. It shows you how absurd and untenable this is that this records custodian at UWPD is saying, basically, “If you get this record and send it to a media outlet, you could be punished with a $10,000 fine.” It shows you how untenable it is to have records custodians or government agencies assessing the motives of a records requester. 

Alice Herman: I think we should talk about the idea of financial gain and this stipulation that a requester not be using the record for financial gain. On its face, it could sound straightforward, because whenever I request a record, I have specified that it’s as a journalist, and not for commercial use. But “financial gain” is a little different from “commercial use.” It’s more vague and more open to interpretation.

Scott Gordon: And nothing in the law actually defines what that is supposed to mean. 

Alice Herman: Conceivably, “financial gain” could mean we write a great story, and a bunch of people start subscribing to Tone Madison. I would disagree with that interpretation, obviously. But it’s so potentially broad that an entity like UWPD, can make that argument, which they did. You sent them an exhaustive list of all of the ways that Tone Madison is operating on a shoestring. Their response is, even if you’re a nonprofit, we don’t think that you’re exempt.

Scott Gordon: ​​Clearly, if we were out to just make money hand over fist, we’d be doing something else entirely. 

Alice Herman: If I wanted to make money, I would be a cop for UWPD.

Scott Gordon: Even if you’re a private citizen just posting stuff online, chances are probably at some point, it’s going to cost you some money.  If you’re using a lot of storage space or whatever, you might be like, “Hey, Venmo me some money so I can buy a coffee or pay my cloud storage bills.” Where do you draw the line? If they were saying financial gain, but if you’re not using it to get more than 50 bucks or something like that, then I could almost understand that, but there’s no guardrails. 

The companies that make these body cameras and the software are making a lot of money. That’s okay, it’s fine for them to make financial gain directly off of the taxpayer, but somebody wanting to review the footage to make money, suddenly, that’s wrong. They’re going on and on about like, “Oh, people are gonna take this footage and put it on YouTube and make ad money.” I don’t care. And yeah, it’s sleazy. And by the way, police haven’t cared for years if media outlets wanted to use somebody’s mugshot, or run a single-source story based on what the cops said.

Alice Herman: Explain Tone‘s status so that people understand.

Scott Gordon: As of early 2023, we’re incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative, which is something that is defined under Wisconsin state statutes. Usually, a worker-owned cooperative is organized so that the worker-owners can receive a dividend distribution when the cooperative has a profitable year. I’ve worked on-and-off at Union Cab, which is also a worker-owned cooperative, for a number of years, and when Union Cab has a profitable year, the board of directors can basically decide to divide up some of that money to pay it out as a dividend to the worker-owners, and invest some of it right back into the business. But in our articles of incorporation, which are also filed with the state and approved by the state, we organize it so that we don’t have capital stock. If we have a profitable year, that means that we don’t pay off a dividend to the owners. That money just gets reinvested right back into the business. Certainly we have the power to pay ourselves more as employees, but the spirit of it is that you’re not supposed to use any surplus money for like the benefit of the individual owners—

Alice Herman: One might say for financial gain.

Scott Gordon: And that’s the thing about “financial gain.” It’s not necessarily profit.

Alice Herman: It’s not commercial use. I’m not a lawyer, but even on its face “commercial use” seems a little bit more legible. I would imagine, and this would be weird, but requesting body-cam footage, and then putting it in some kind of advertisement for something, that would clearly be commercial use. But, “financial gain,” my having a Twitter account could be construed as being out for financial gain. It’s overly broad. It just straight up should not be up to police departments to decide which records they want to charge for.

Scott Gordon: Basically, it functionally is, unless you have the time and money to haul them into court. Unfortunately, the best public records laws have basically no teeth. I feel like at every level of government, from local to federal, we’ve made this political choice, where we have records laws that might be really good in spirit, and might create some really good language around access. But we’ve also created this bottleneck by not creating a lot of staff positions to process record requests. Even at larger government agencies, the staffing levels aren’t up to the sheer volume of requests they’re gonna get. And of course, the websites and software and record-keeping systems that different government agencies use are horrible.  

Essentially, we’re gonna promise people that body camera footage will bring them more transparency, and then we’re just gonna jam that footage into the same bottleneck that’s always been there, without addressing it. It’s totally not serious. It’s a total con job.

Undermining the spirit of open-records laws

Alice Herman: And as much as I want to roast UWPD for being shitty and operating in bad faith, I think the more serious problem is the way this law was written. I’m also confused about why there wasn’t more resistance to this, more outcry from our profession. It seems like this passed relatively quietly and with a surprising amount of bipartisan support in the Assembly. On some level, I would argue that as a profession, we sort of failed to stop this from happening. Or at least we didn’t raise enough alarm bells when it was making its way through the statehouse. I’m not even blaming anybody specifically—I didn’t know it was happening either.

Scott Gordon: At the time, I’m pretty sure it got past me. I saw some reports about it and didn’t register how concerning this is and how much of a departure it is. It creates this—

Alice Herman: A morass! I don’t love waxing poetic about the Wisconsin Idea or Wisconsin history or whatever. But the spirit of good governance and transparency? Yeah, I like it in theory, but this law seems to directly contradict that.

Scott Gordon: It says a lot that a police department that is part of the public university system is really taking full advantage of this, really fast.

Alice Herman: We haven’t even talked about how this might be impacting journalists and citizens in Milwaukee or in other parts of the state.

Scott Gordon: I’m very curious to hear from people in other corners of the state because there have to be other police agencies already taking advantage of this. I’m sure it will become the standard thing before too long, because this was something that all the major police organizations in the state were lobbying for. The legislators who wrote it included former cops and a current police officer. One of them, Rep. John Spiros (R-Marshfield), said in his written testimony that the bill was “crafted in close coordination with law enforcement.”

Alice Herman: The author of the bill and many of the bill’s co-sponsors are current or former law enforcement officers. So there’s a clear bias. There was a clear bias in the way this bill was crafted, and that’s evident in how it’s being implemented locally. Something that we should talk about is why MPD turned over those records so fast. Because my understanding is that they had to, and couldn’t impose a redaction fee.

Scott Gordon: I think in most cases, state law would override the local ordinance, but in this case, state law says that they may charge redaction fees, not that they have to. They clearly did have to do redactions in the videos they released to us. Even in my first skim through some of it, there are faces blurred out, like when someone’s carrying a kid through the protest in the background or whatever, and there are portions of it that are entirely blurred out.

The spirit of not charging redaction fees is that, for one thing you have no control over what might need redacting, or what judgments an agency is going to make about what to redact. You just literally have no control over that. You might have a little control over the sheer amount of stuff you’re asking for. MPD managed to turn things around shockingly fast and charged you what, five bucks for a flash drive? 

Alice Herman: Yeah. It’s totally not a prohibitive cost. I mean, would I prefer to not pay a dime? Sure. But compared with the cost for them to redact the video? 

Scott Gordon: I’m sure those costs would vary from agency to agency. In the text of the law, they have to base it on the hourly pay of the lowest-paid person who’s capable of doing the reaction work.

Alice Herman: So let’s assume somebody is paid $15 an hour, and you’re requesting many hours of footage, which would be a normal thing to do. You’re gonna end up paying hundreds of dollars, potentially, for footage that should have been free and would have been free, before three months ago.

Scott Gordon: When I had a conversation with Mark Lovicott at UWPD, he acknowledged that maybe it’s not fair for the initial requester of a batch of records to shoulder the cost burden for that, if it’s going to be out there and potentially used by a bunch of people.

Alice Herman: The way that a police department could implement this law would potentially result in one news outlet or one curious person footing the bill for everybody else who ends up mining through the footage and reporting on it or disseminating it in some way.

Scott Gordon: What if everybody shared those costs incrementally as part of a functioning public sector?

Yet more things about Act 253 that don’t make sense

Alice Herman: I think anybody should have access to a record, so I don’t want to be splitting hairs here, but they don’t even make a provision for news agencies.

One of the ways you can get your fees waived is if the requester has not made more than 10 requests to that authority for records containing audio or video content. In a way, this does the opposite of creating a carve-out for news agencies. It de facto excludes news organizations from any kind of exemption, because any group that’s going to be regularly requesting records is by default, not exempt. It just has the opposite effect of what most public records laws across the country would have, which is a carve-out for journalists. 

Scott Gordon: If you’re an investigative journalist, or if you’re just a local gadfly who likes to ask for a lot of records, this law really works against you.

Alice Herman: Totally! Those are the people who should have it. I think it’s good to also note that this doesn’t just impact news organizations. It impacts the local person who runs a Facebook group where they alert people to developments in a particular area. We probably have 50 groups like that in Madison, with people who are competently filing records requests on a regular basis and keeping each other informed.

Scott Gordon: If Freedom Inc. was filing a records request for body-cam footage, could they get slapped with this because they solicit donations? I mean, it’s a 501(c)(3), but it solicits donations.

Alice Herman: Or any group that is specifically looking to hold law enforcement agencies accountable. If they’re regularly requesting records, they automatically become subject to these fees.

Scott Gordon: I do think that how it affects media is only part of it. It’s a little too easy for journalists to—

Alice Herman: Cry journalist?

Scott Gordon: Yeah, cry journalist, exactly. It’s a little too easy for journalists to be ridiculously neutral until something directly impacts them, and then Hulk out.

Alice Herman: And to underline something that you said earlier, it should not matter why you request a record. The idea that you have to justify yourself, sign your name on a document swearing to adhere to some really vague standard to request a record, it goes against the spirit of transparency and public records law in general. Obviously, state and local governments aren’t subject to FOIA, but even if we’re looking at FOIA as a point of reference, this goes against the spirit of it.

Scott Gordon: At least FOIA delineates between commercial requesters and all these other groups of people. You shouldn’t have somebody from the government looking into your public records request and trying to determine who you are and why you’re asking for it, whether that’s a cop or your county clerk or someone who works in the records office. It’s just so absurd and untenable and unenforceable.

Alice Herman: The bottom line is that the people who were paying close attention to this when it was passing, like Bill Lueders, were worried that it would be implemented in this way. And almost immediately after the law went into effect, we’re seeing local police departments implementing it in a way that he and others outlined. I guess we were warned.

The fact that you have to be “an individual,” to seek an exemption from the fees, feels really vague. I don’t see how I could be more individual than I am, as somebody who’s not employed by Tone Madison, not accepting any kind of payment from Tone Madison currently, not a member of the organization. But by association, I’m not an individual, or I am somehow? It just goes to show how the vagueness of the way it was written will impact any requester.

Scott Gordon: It’s kind of like the body camera thing in general: the police asked for this, but they didn’t actually think through how it would work. They didn’t think about the downstream problems it would cause.

Alice Herman: Or the costs that they would have to incur.

Scott Gordon: This law could end up wasting some money for them, too. People send in requests, and it takes time to field those requests, and then they can decide they don’t want to pay these redaction fees and walk away without getting the footage. I don’t think this is actually going to generate any real revenue increase for police. I’m sure people will make an austerity argument for, “Oh, we need this revenue,” and then people will fall for that, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think it will just discourage people from making records requests in general.

I mean, to tell somebody, “If you share this with a media outlet, we’re gonna punish you by fining you $10,000”? Even in the dumbest possible version of the United States, that has to be unconstitutional. For someone from a public university to do that is so fucked up. Sifting and winnowing, my ass. 

Alice Herman: I’ve never encountered something like that. I’ve certainly been told no. I think this is the only time I’ve requested a record and explicitly been warned that I could be penalized in a real way. Not like, “Oh, this might end up costing you about $100.” And this is a fine. It’s not the cost of producing a record. I think that’s why it was shocking. Even if they had responded more delicately, the fact is that there is an implicit threat. If you sign this document stating that you’re an individual not requesting just for purposes of financial gain, there’s an implicit threat that you could be fined $10,000. 

Scott Gordon: And I’m sure this is somebody who’s just doing their job.

Alice Herman: Yeah. I’m not coming at the person who had to send us an email. I mean, I’m not willing to play chicken with $10,000.

Scott Gordon: I think for UWPD to say that it would apply this even for an actual nonprofit 501 (c)(3) media outlet, I think that’s way tipping their hand.

Alice Herman: I had the same thought. I was like, really? UWPD literally could have just said, you’re not technically a non-profit. That seems like a strategic error on their part.

Scott Gordon: That shows just how blatantly they’re going to take advantage of this.

Alice Herman: As frustrating as it is, it’s also totally predictable.