# 2026-05-27 Conway PD Maintains Withholding on Appeal On **2026-05-27** the Conway Police Department issued a six-page legal response to Joshua Dunlap's 2026-05-22 Arkansas FOIA appeal of the items-D/G/H/I withholdings in `PD-2026-477`. The letter — signed "Custodian of Records, Conway Police Department" and transmitted by [[Drake Vickers]] on 2026-05-28 09:01 CDT (Gmail thread `19e50c97d4482910`, message `19e6ee41be8b3616`) — **denies the appeal on substance** and maintains all four withholdings in full: Item D (SharedNetworks / network-sharing snapshots), Item G (full-deployment-life Federal Searches export), Item H (currently-enabled custom hot lists), and Item I (pre-April-2025 audit logs). The Department concurrently announces that the City is requesting an opinion from the **Arkansas Attorney General** on the same questions, noting the appeal raises "recurring questions regarding the interaction between Arkansas FOIA, the Arkansas Automatic License Plate Reader System Act, vendor-hosted ALPR platforms, and records generated by or derived from ALPR system use" ([[Custodian Response on Appeal]], p. 6). The Department also commits to continued production of "non-exempt records, including contracts, invoices, procurement records, policies, and the public compiled practice-and-usage data required by Ark. Code Ann. § 12-12-1805" (p. 6). ## Sources - [[Custodian Response on Appeal]] — the response letter itself (6 pp., OCR'd); the legal argument is captured there with verbatim quotes and page citations. Gmail trail: Joshua's 2026-05-22 17:52 appeal (`19e50c97d4482910`) → Vickers' 2026-05-28 09:01 transmittal email with the response attached as `Dunlap Response 5 27.pdf` (message `19e6ee41be8b3616`). ## Significance - **The administrative appeal is exhausted.** The Department's denial completes the administrative process for `PD-2026-477`. The next procedural step under Arkansas FOIA is a circuit-court action under § 25-19-107(a)(1)(A) — citizen denied rights may petition for mandamus or injunctive relief; court must hear within seven days; attorney's fees available unless the agency's position is "substantially justified." Filing is a decision for Joshua; recorded as open follow-up. - **The Department's legal theory hardens into a substance-versus-incidental segregability frame.** The 2026-05-22 [[Custodian Response Letter]] cited the segregability provision (§ 25-19-105(f)) and asserted that the protected information is "not reasonably segregable." The appeal response builds an affirmative case for that conclusion: the protected information is "the substance of the requested records," not "incidental information commingled with otherwise public information" (p. 5). Whether this frame survives external review (AG opinion, circuit-court ruling) is the load-bearing question for the disclosure-posture reversal. - **The Department rebuts Joshua's prior-production-establishes-segregability argument directly.** The response (p. 1): *"Prior production does not waive a statutory restriction or FOIA exemption, nor does it establish that all similar records or later-requested records are reasonably segregable for purposes of Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105(f)."* And on Item G specifically (p. 3): *"The prior production of a shorter Federal Searches export does not control the Department's current legal review of a full-deployment-life export."* The Department's position is that the prior March–April 2026 export's redacted-officer-fields production was its discretionary act, not an admission that the record type is categorically segregable. - **The Department rejects the § 12-12-1804 retention argument on its merits.** Joshua's appeal had argued that if pre-April-2025 audit logs contain "captured plate data," then § 12-12-1804(a)'s 150-day retention cap is squarely implicated — either the logs shouldn't exist (statute violated) or they don't contain captured plate data (no § 12-12-1808 basis to withhold). The Department's response (p. 4): *"The Department does not interpret that retention provision to create a public right of access to audit logs or to override disclosure restrictions in Ark. Code Ann. § 12-12-1808 or exemptions under Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105."* That is, even a statutory breach does not create disclosure rights. This is a legally available reading but it leaves an unanswered factual question: do pre-April-2025 audit logs contain captured plate data, and if so, are they being retained in violation of § 12-12-1804(a)? - **The City's announced Arkansas AG opinion request is the most procedurally consequential element of the response.** AG opinions are advisory but Arkansas agencies and courts give them substantial weight, and AG opinions interpreting FOIA's interaction with sectoral statutes (like the ALPR Act) directly bind future agency conduct in their reasoning. If the AG opines that the Department's substance-versus-incidental segregability frame is wrong, every Arkansas ALPR FOIA going forward — Conway PD's, LRPD's, ASP's, PCSO's, future jurisdictions' — would feel it. If the AG opines the frame is right, the corpus's federal-access and default-on-sharing findings sit on records that may be permanently unobtainable through FOIA at this scale. The AG opinion request itself is not in the corpus; the City of Conway's request letter to the AG and any AG opinion in response are both Tier-2 candidates for `web archive/` once they become public. - **The "Custodian of Records" signature continues to mask the individual decision-maker.** The 2026-05-22 [[Custodian Response Letter]] and the 2026-05-27 appeal response are both signed in the institutional title with no individual name. The author's legal reasoning is consistent across both documents; whether they're the same person is undetermined.