If text messages from a state trooper's personal phone end up in the trooper's personnel file because of an investigation, can the public get them under FOIA, even though the trooper says they're personal?
Plain-English summary
A FOIA requester asked the Arkansas Department of Public Safety for the disciplinary records of all law-enforcement officers present during a particular incident. One of those officers was Trooper Cade Padgett. The custodian collected the responsive records, made redactions, and proposed to release them. Trooper Padgett objected to one specific item: text messages from his personal phone that appeared in his personnel file (pages 91-92 and 96-99). He said the messages were personal and should not come out. The custodian then redacted the parts of the texts that referred to family matters but proposed to release the rest. Padgett asked the AG to review.
Attorney General Tim Griffin sided with the custodian. The text messages, even though they originated on the trooper's personal phone, are now personnel records because they are part of the file maintained by his employer about him. Personnel records are public unless disclosing them would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, and Arkansas applies a two-step balancing test (Young v. Rice). At step one, the redacted, non-family content of the messages does not give rise to more than a de minimis privacy interest. At step two, even if it did, the public's interest in seeing the conduct of a state trooper would outweigh that privacy interest, especially because the messages are also referenced in the trooper's evaluation records.
The custodian's family-related redactions track prior AG opinions (2021-090, 2015-003) that hold that "marital status and family life" content can be redacted under the privacy standard.
What this means for you
If you are a law-enforcement officer in Arkansas
Anything on your personal phone that ends up in your employer's file (because of an internal-affairs investigation, a complaint, or a discipline review) becomes a personnel record subject to FOIA's privacy-balancing test. Not all of it is releasable. Family-life content can be redacted. But the work-related portions, especially anything tied to a complaint or a use-of-force incident, will likely come out.
If you don't want personal text messages to end up public, the time to think about it is before the texts are pulled into an investigation. Once they're in the file, the privacy test runs against the public interest, and the scale is tipped toward disclosure.
If you are a FOIA requester or journalist seeking police records
Text messages that surface in disciplinary or internal-affairs files are subject to release. Don't accept "they're from a personal phone, so they're personal" as a reason to withhold. The right question is whether the content is connected to the officer's official conduct. If yes, it gets released subject to redaction of strictly personal (family) content.
Push for an itemized basis for any redactions. The AG's analysis here approves redacting family-life content but not work-related conduct.
If you are a records custodian for a police agency
Walk through the two-step privacy test on each piece of text content. Step one: more than a de minimis privacy interest? Step two: if so, does public interest outweigh? For texts about official conduct, the answer is almost always release. For texts about family ("my wife is angry I'm working late"), redact. For texts that are mixed, redact the family piece and release the rest.
Document each redaction so a reviewing court (or AG) can see your reasoning. The opinion approves the custodian's narrow redactions for "family matters" while keeping the official-conduct content.
If you are an internal-affairs investigator
Be aware that anything you collect from an officer's personal phone may end up in a personnel file and subject to FOIA. Limit your collection to what's actually relevant to the investigation. Documenting the scope of the device review (what you looked at, what was responsive, what wasn't) creates a clean record for later FOIA review.
Common questions
Q: Why are texts from a personal phone considered personnel records?
A: Because they ended up in the personnel file the agency keeps about the trooper. The FOIA classifies records based on what is in the agency's possession and how it relates to the employee, not based on which device originated the content.
Q: What's the Young v. Rice balancing test?
A: A two-step test the Arkansas Supreme Court adopted for personnel records. Step one: does the disclosure invade a privacy interest greater than de minimis? Step two: if yes, does the public's interest in disclosure outweigh that privacy interest? The "scale is tipped in favor of public access," meaning the person resisting disclosure has the burden, and exemptions are narrowly construed.
Q: What kinds of content does the privacy interest protect?
A: The Young test focuses on personal or intimate information. Prior AG opinions cited here (2021-090, 2015-003) treat "marital status and family life" content as protected. Things like medical records, dates of birth, social security numbers, and similar discrete personal details are also typically redacted under separate FOIA rules.
Q: What's the public-interest factor for police records?
A: Strong. Law-enforcement officers exercise substantial public trust (the power to arrest, to use force, to investigate crime). The AG's office has long held that the public has a legitimate interest in records related to official police conduct.
Q: Does this make every text on an officer's phone public?
A: No. The trigger is whether the records are in the personnel file or are otherwise in the agency's possession in connection with the officer's employment. A trooper's personal weekend group chat that never gets pulled into a work review is not a personnel record. But once content is gathered for an investigation and incorporated into the file, it falls within FOIA's reach.
Q: Why does the AG mention that the messages are also referenced in the evaluation records?
A: To show that the public has documented interest in the messages as part of a misconduct review. That bolsters the public-interest side of the balancing test.
Background and statutory framework
Arkansas FOIA splits employee-related records into two categories. Personnel records are open to public inspection unless disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy (A.C.A. § 25-19-105(b)(12)). Employee-evaluation or job-performance records are closed unless the four-part test of § 25-19-105(c)(1) is met. The category determines the legal test.
The Arkansas Supreme Court's Young v. Rice opinion gave us the two-step privacy test for personnel records. Step one screens out trivial privacy interests; step two applies a balancing test, with the scales tipped toward disclosure. Stilley v. McBride confirmed that the burden of resisting disclosure is on the person asserting privacy.
Personal phone content that gets pulled into the employer's records (often during a use-of-force review or an internal-affairs investigation) is the kind of mixed-context content that the Young test handles. Prior AG opinions (2021-090, 2015-003) have approved redaction of "marital status and family life" portions of such records while approving release of the rest. Opinion 2025-079 applies the same approach to a state trooper's text messages.
Citations and references
Statutes:
- A.C.A. § 25-19-103(7)(A) (public-record definition)
- A.C.A. § 25-19-105(b)(12) (personnel records exception)
- A.C.A. § 25-19-105(c)(3)(B)(i) (opinion-request authority)
- A.C.A. § 25-19-105(f) (redaction authority)
Cases:
- Harrill & Sutter, PLLC v. Farrar, 2012 Ark. 180, 402 S.W.3d 511 (2012)
- Pulaski Cnty. v. Ark. Democrat-Gazette, Inc., 370 Ark. 435, 260 S.W.3d 718 (2007)
- Young v. Rice, 308 Ark. 593, 826 S.W.2d 252 (1992)
- Stilley v. McBride, 332 Ark. 306, 965 S.W.2d 125 (1998)
- Thomas v. Hall, 2012 Ark. 66, 399 S.W.3d 387 (2012)
- Davis v. Van Buren Sch. Dist., 2019 Ark. App. 466, 572 S.W.3d 466 (2019)
Prior AG opinions cited:
- Ark. Att'y Gen. Ops. 2021-090, 2016-055, 2015-072, 2015-057, 2015-003, 2009-067, 2006-038, 2005-095, 2003-073, 2001-112, 2001-028, 99-147, 95-351, 94-198, 93-055
Source
Original opinion text
BOB R. BROOKS JR. JUSTICE BUILDING
101 WEST CAPITOL AVENUE
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS 72201
Opinion No. 2025-079
August 20, 2025
Trooper Cade Padgett
Arkansas State Police
Via email only: [email protected]
Dear Trooper Padgett:
You have requested an opinion from this Office regarding the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Your request, which is made as the subject of the records, is based on A.C.A. § 25-19-105(c)(3)(B)(i). This subdivision authorizes the custodian, requester, or the subject of certain employee-related records to seek an opinion stating whether the custodian's decision regarding the release of such records is consistent with the FOIA.
According to the correspondence you provided, the Arkansas Department of Public Safety received a FOIA request for "[a]ll disciplinary records contained in any law enforcement agent's personnel file who was present during [a particular] incident." The custodian identified responsive records, made redactions, and sent them to you for review. You objected to the inclusion of unredacted screenshots of text messages from your personal phone, asserting that they pertained solely to personal matters. The records custodian subsequently redacted portions of the text messages referencing family matters but left the remaining content intact. The records custodian determined that the text messages, as redacted, were subject to release. You have now requested that I review the custodian's decision regarding the text messages to determine whether that decision is consistent with the FOIA.
RESPONSE
In my opinion, the custodian's decision to release the records as redacted is consistent with the FOIA.
DISCUSSION
- General rules. A document must be disclosed in response to a FOIA request if (1) the request was directed to an entity subject to the FOIA, (2) the requested document is a public record, and (3) no exceptions allow the document to be withheld.
The first two elements appear to be met. The request was made to the Arkansas Department of Public Safety, which is a public entity subject to the FOIA. And the records at issue appear to be public records. Because these records are held by a public entity, they are presumed to be public records, although that presumption is rebuttable. Given that I have no information to suggest that the presumption can be rebutted here, I will focus on whether any exemptions prevent the documents' disclosure.
For purposes of the FOIA, employees' personnel files normally contain two distinct groups of records: "personnel records" and "employee-evaluation or job-performance records." Personnel records are records that pertain to an individual employee that were not created by or at the behest of the employer to evaluate the employee. Employee-evaluation and job-performance records, on the other hand, are records (1) created by or at the behest of the employer (2) to evaluate the employee (3) that detail the employee's performance or lack of performance on the job.
The test for whether these two types of documents may be released differs significantly. Thus, the custodian must first decide whether a record meets the definition of either a "personnel record" or an "employee-evaluation or job-performance record" and then apply the appropriate test for that record to determine whether the record should be released under the FOIA.
- Personnel records. Under the FOIA, personnel records are open to public inspection except "to the extent that disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." While the FOIA does not define the phrase "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy," the Arkansas Supreme Court has provided some guidance. In Young v. Rice, the Court applied a balancing test that weighs the public's interest in accessing the records against the individual's interest in keeping them private. The balancing test, which takes place "with the scale tipped in favor of public access," has two steps.
First, the custodian must assess whether the information contained in the requested document is of a personal or intimate nature such that it gives rise to a greater than de minimis privacy interest. If the privacy interest is minimal, then the records should be disclosed. Second, if the information does give rise to a greater than de minimis privacy interest, then the custodian must determine whether that privacy interest is outweighed by the public's interest in disclosure. Because the exceptions must be narrowly construed, the person resisting disclosure bears the burden of showing that, under the circumstances, the employee's privacy interests outweigh the public's interest. The fact that the subject of the records may consider the release of the records an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy is irrelevant to the analysis because the test is objective.
Even if a document, when considered as a whole, meets the test for disclosure, it may contain discrete pieces of information that have to be redacted.
- Classification and disclosure of text messages. The text messages, found on pages 91-92 and 96-99, are records that pertain to you as an individual employee, and they were not created by or at the behest of your employer to evaluate you as an employee. Therefore, they qualify as "personnel records" under the FOIA.
Applying this balancing test to the text messages on pages 91-92 and 96-99, I find that the balance weighs in favor of release. The custodian has properly redacted certain discrete pieces of information that are exempt from release under the FOIA. None of the remaining information in the text messages gives rise to more than a de minimis privacy interest, although the public does have a significant interest in the content of the text messages. Because the public's interest in disclosure outweighs your privacy interest in the text messages, the custodian's decision to release the records is consistent with the FOIA.
Assistant Attorney General Justin Hughes prepared this opinion, which I hereby approve.
Sincerely,
TIM GRIFFIN
Attorney General