I can't imagine you won't be receiving a lot of "Agree" votes for this point of view.
LE is there to serve the people, and confidential/ongoing investigations aside, should answer to the people.
On the flip side, from my experience selling to and working with smaller LE groups, there are a couple reasons they don't want to do this, from practical standpoints (not looking at right or wrong):
- Who is going to get all of that information together, scrub that information of confidential information as to not cause issues with future investigations/arrests? I'm not saying that shouldn't have created a plan for this before they put the system in, it's just that, from my experience, most haven't.
- This is more of a 1a, but once this information has to be made available, who handles any and all requests for the information going forward? Most municipalities don't have the resources to process dozens of potential requests.
- They don't know what they are actually required to disclose, so they push it off to the courts to decide, which takes it off their hands, and probably gives them more time to get a system together if they believe they will actually have to provide answers. The skeptic might think they would do this to give them time to hide damaging evidence, but I generally don't think that is the case in a situation like this. Either way, I'm very obviously not a lawyer, but I think they are within their rights to deny/sue to make a court make a legal decision - the court wouldn't have taken the case otherwise.
I don't think any of these are completely valid excuses, but overall local smaller LE agencies I have worked with don't get great recurring funding for technology system maintenance and management. They rely on grant funding which is generally not able to be put toward recurring system maintenance or full-time staff positions. I don't know what the answer to this problem is.
I'm sure others here have more direct experience that myself, primarily interacting as a outside technology integrator/contractor.