A man walked into the Greenville County Law Enforcement Center and asked for a copy of an incident report, something he had the legal right to receive with no questions asked.

Had he told the officer screening people who entered the building that he was a reporter, he would have been directed to a public information officer for the Greenville Police Department and been given a free copy of the report with no information removed.

In order to test public access to public records, he didn't volunteer that he was a member of the media. He was directed to a clerk behind a window who charged him $6 for a two-page report that had 21 black marks on it, removing such information as names and addresses.

A leading First Amendment lawyer says what the Greenville County official did may be in violation of the state's open records law.

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The South Carolina Freedom of Information Act states that public bodies "may establish and collect fees not to exceed the actual cost of searching for or making copies of records."

It also allows withholding "information of a personal nature where the public disclosure thereof would constitute unreasonable invasion of personal privacy" and information that could endanger "the life, health or property of any person," among other reasons.

The report in question was about a car crashing in front of a house after a police chase.

Neither the fee charged nor the redactions in this case seem in line with the FOIA, in the view of Jay Bender, an attorney for the South Carolina Press Association.

"It seems astonishing to me to think that a computerized record couldn't be retrieved for a lot less than $6," he said. "I think Greenville's trying to make money off the citizens requesting information, and that's contrary to the law."

In Laurens County, the Sheriff's Office and the Laurens City Police Department don't charge the public for copies of incident reports, but members of the public must go through the chiefs to get copies.

The Pickens County Sheriff's Office charges 25 cents a page.

Records of both the Greenville Police Department and the Greenville County Sheriff's Office are maintained by a separate agency, the county Public Safety Department, which also runs the detention center.

After being screened by an officer at the center's entrance and directed to the records division, the reporter stood in line about 10 minutes while two clerks behind a glass window waited on other residents.

When his turn came, the reporter asked clerk Ernestine Smith for a copy of a report about a Sept. 27 incident -- less than a week earlier -- involving a vehicle that crashed into a wall in front of an Augusta Road home.

After some difficulty communicating that this was a police incident report and not a traffic accident report, the reporter gave Smith the case number.

A crime reporter for The News had obtained a copy of the report a few days earlier from the Greenville Police Department's public information officer, and the newspaper had published a story on the incident.

Smith informed the reporter, who never volunteered his identity, that "all the important information" on the report would be blacked out, and that there would be a $6 charge. She asked if he still wanted a copy.

He asked if he could look through the reports and find it himself. She told him no.

She asked if he had been involved in the incident. He said no. She asked to see some identification. He handed over his driver's license. She asked if he was getting the report for someone else. He said no.

Satisfied with his answers, she printed a copy of the report and, reading through it carefully, used a black marker to conceal selected information. She then made a photocopy of the blacked-out copy, which she handed to the reporter upon payment of $6.

Capt. Jinny Moran, who supervises the records management service division of the county's Department of Public Safety, said department policy on redacting information on incident reports is designed to protect victims of crime and innocent people involved.

For example, a suspect could find out the address of a victim through a report and retaliate, if that information weren't redacted, she said. She cited a section of the FOI law that allows withholding such information.

But the clerk, in this case, went too far, Moran said.

She blacked out the complainant's name, which in this incident was the Williamston Police Department, and the address where the crash occurred, both of which should have been left on the report, Moran said.

The clerk is relatively new on the job, Moran said.

She also redacted the tag number, vehicle identification number and name of the owner of the car involved in the crash, as well as the name of the suspect and another person who was riding in the car.

No one had been charged in the case, Moran said. The driver of the vehicle ran away after it caught fire in the crash, according to the report.

She cited a section of the law that exempts from disclosure "the premature release of information to be used in a prospective law enforcement action."

Nothing was redacted from the copy given to the newspaper's crime reporter by the Greenville Police Department's public information officer.

Bender said there is no justification for routinely redacting such information.

"I suspect that if somebody ran from the police and drove his car into someone's house, the driver of that car and that car are probably not in jeopardy from the public knowing about that event," he said.

"Unfortunately, a lot of law enforcement departments in the state still think they have the authority to make up exceptions to the law."

The $6 fee for copies of incident reports was set by a county ordinance, said Jim Dorreity, assistant county supervisor who oversees the Department of Public Safety.

Greenville County Attorney Mark Tollison said the ordinance, adopted in 1997, predates his time on the job, and he plans to research to find out how the amount was determined.

The charge was part of a schedule of fees for such things as fingerprinting and mug shots.

County Councilwoman Lottie Gibson, who was on the council at the time, doesn't remember how it was set.

"I do recall that at the time staff was pulled from someplace else to research that, and it was taking a lot of time because there was so many of them," she said.

Moran, the captain in charge of records, said when the $6 fee was established, the process was more time-consuming than it is now.

At that time, when someone wanted a copy of an incident report, a clerk had to look up the case number on a computer, walk to a filing cabinet and pull out the report, make a copy of it and re-file the report.

Now the county has a Hewlett-Packard imaging system by which handwritten reports can be retrieved electronically and printed in a matter of seconds. It takes a couple of minutes for a clerk to read it and mark through portions deemed unsuitable for the public's eyes.

Moran said she doesn't know how the $6 amount was determined.

"It's probably just a consensus," she said.

Bender said, "That's probably a number they pulled out of the air."

Staff writers Lorando Lockhart