Training Courses

Basic Public Records Law Certification for MA Public Safety Personnel

Date & Time:
  • September 21, 2026 – October 9, 2026 - 9:00 AM–3:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time)
Location:
Webinar/Zoom
Agency:
Municipal Police Institute

Facts

  • Instructor: Eric Atstupenas, Esquire
  • Dates: September 21, 2026 - October 9, 2026
  • Location: Webinar/Zoom
  • Time: 9:00 am - 3:00 pm
  • Price: $679.00 USD

Course Overview

This intensive three-week online program equips records access officers and supervisors with the knowledge and skills to manage public records requests confidently and lawfully. Taught by the General Counsel of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, the course combines foundational legal principles with practical, real-world scenarios—including the critical area of body-worn camera requests that few other Massachusetts programs address in depth. Participants leave with not just individual competency but a complete departmental program, including written policies, tracking systems, and audit checklists.

What a Graduate Can Do

  • Justify a withholding that holds. Five checks — authority, target, reason and harm, segregability, plain language — run against every redaction before it leaves the building.
  • Route what isn't a request. Subpoenas, court orders, discovery demands, litigation holds, preservation letters. All arrive addressed to the RAO. None is a public records request.
  • Survive the hard week. The officer-involved shooting, the reporter, the data broker filing forty requests a month.
  • Apply the current law. Mack v. Bristol DA (2024), the booking-photo and CORI rule, POST-era discipline records, AI prompts and outputs as records.
  • Change the department, not just the person. Module 7 sends a certified RAO home with a program, a written policy, a tracking log, and an audit checklist.

Program Structure

Modules 1–7: Foundations and the Request Lifecycle
The presumption. The RAO. Intake, the ten-day clock, fees, extensions, appeals, retention and lawful destruction — and how to build a department program around all of it.

Modules 8–13: Exemptions and Defensible Withholding
The Specificity Scorecard first, then every exemption a public safety agency actually uses: (a), (c), (f), the remainder, attorney-client privilege, and the post-Mack personnel and internal affairs file.

Modules 14–19: Applied Practice: The Hard Requests
Body-worn camera. Subpoenas. Media and high-profile incidents. Commercial and serial requesters. ALPR, drones, and AI. Then drafting, petitions, and a capstone worked from intake to production.

The Module No One Else Teaches

Module 14: Body-Worn Camera and Digital Evidence Requests
Footage on a vendor's cloud is a public record. Control, not location. That is the easy part. The hard part is a single clip holding a victim, a juvenile, a bystander, and an officer — and the segregability analysis, redaction burden, chargeable time, defensible fee estimate, format of production, and retention schedule that follow from it — then the request for footage that has already aged out. No other Massachusetts public records training addresses this seriously.