If public access to police reports weren’t so rare in Kansas, fewer people probably would suspect that the release of a report tied to a candidate for governor was at least partially motivated by politics.

Police reports and investigative files have been closed to the public in Kansas for more than 30 years. Usually the only way to obtain those records is to file a lawsuit. Yet, when a newspaper recently filed a records request for a police report on the 1998 raid of a strip club where Rep. Paul Davis was present, the report was released in a matter of days.

It was “an economic decision,” the Montgomery County attorney told the Journal-World. Although no one had threatened to sue to obtain the records, he decided such a lawsuit was inevitable and it would be a waste of county money to defend the case. That may have been a reasonable judgment, but when the county attorney decided to call and inform the campaign of Gov. Sam Brownback that the sheriff was going to release the records, the decision took on a more political slant.

It’s a case where the county attorney did the right thing, but perhaps not for the right reasons.

Mike Kautsch, a Kansas University law professor who specializes in media law, actually praised the action as “a fine precedent” and “a model of how the law is intended to work.” Rather than automatically rejecting a request to open the record, Kautsch said, the county attorney exercised his discretion and decided to open the record without forcing the newspaper to take legal action.

Kansas’ restrictions on the release of police records are among the tightest in the nation, and the Kansas Press Association has been arguing for more openness for years. This year, the Legislature agreed to limited public access to police arrest and search warrant affidavits but not to police incident and investigative reports. It’s still routine for police to refuse to release those records to individuals or the news media. Unless a news organization is willing to commit $25,000 or more to fight for access, that’s where the request usually ends.

The fact that the Coffeyville sheriff’s report was released with relative ease should be the rule in Kansas, not the exception. If that were the case, people wouldn’t be questioning whether this particular case was motivated by politics.