The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Paul Wednesday, saying the police department has “unlawfully refused to provide … critical public data about its policing activities in the community.”

St. Paul City Attorney Lyndsey Olson responded Wednesday, saying in a statement that “the Administration supports the work of the ACLU and has directed the Police Department to provide all available data as soon as possible.”

The ACLU is seeking information about each stop, citation, arrest and use of force since 2015 from St. Paul police, according to the lawsuit filed in Ramsey County District Court.

“Although St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and SPPD Chief Todd Axtell have publicly committed to government transparency and police accountability, the SPPD has not produced information required by Minnesota government data laws,” said the lawsuit.

A spokesman for St. Paul police, Steve Linders, said the department “is committed to transparency and will work with the City Attorney’s Office to fulfill our legal obligations.”

The ACLU has been requesting information from the police department since May 2018.

After the police department responded that, “among other things, that not all requested data existed,” the city attorney’s office wrote to the ACLU in September 2018 “providing further denials” and directed the organization to review individual incident reports in the department’s records unit, according to the lawsuit, which says the ACLU has continued to seek information from the police department.

ACLU: INTEREST IN KNOWING MORE ABOUT POLICING IN ST. PAUL

In December 2016, for the first time, the St. Paul Police Department publicly released information about traffic stops that it collected for 15 years. Axtell, who took the department’s helm in June 2016, said he made a promise to the community during his first week on the job about becoming more transparent with police data.

The police department published the traffic stop data on its website and has updated it annually.

The initial 15 years of data showed St. Paul police officers routinely stopped, searched and ticketed black drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Black drivers accounted for 35 percent of the tickets issued by police compared with 26 percent for white drivers, according to the initial data set. In 2017, black drivers received 28 percent of the citations written by St. Paul police.

“The public data already out there made us want to know more about policing in St. Paul,” said ACLU-MN staff attorney David McKinney on Wednesday.

The organization “is committed to fostering discourse on improving community-police relations and ensuring that police departments address racial and other disparities in police stops, arrests, and uses of force,” according to the lawsuit.

The ACLU collects and analyzes public data from police departments. It studied Minneapolis and decided they should look next at Minnesota’s second-largest city, McKinney said.

The ACLU of Minnesota said in a statement that the St. Paul Police Department “claims that it doesn’t track investigative stops, even though the department’s own manual requires officers to record these stops.”

The police department also said its electronic storage system is “antiquated and does not allow for saving an electronic report, or even emailing a report,” according to the ACLU’s lawsuit.

“Police have provided only a fraction of the data the ACLU of Minnesota has been requesting for more than 18 months, even though this data is clearly public under state law,” McKinney said.