Pulaski County Sheriff, Eric Higgins and Retired LRPD Chief  & Current Director of CLEST, Heath Helton

A Little Rock Police Lt. Confesses That Public Records Are Gone. The Pulaski County Sheriff Had the Recording and Buried The Felony Complaint.

Records Are Power, and They Knew the Records Were Gone in 2023

For over three years I asked two agencies, the Little Rock Police Department and the Pulaski County Sheriff, for public records, the kind that would have documented a police officer's conduct. For three years the answer was the same tidy nothing. No records. No file. Nothing to produce. Move along, boy.

Here's the part that turns that runaround into something uglier. They already knew. Back in 2023, the Little Rock Police Department said so, and I happened to record the phone call. Arkansas only requires one participating person to know a call is being recorded. A one-party state.

In a recorded phone call that year, an LRPD lieutenant said the quiet part out loud. These are his words, straight off the recording:

"We haven't been really good at keeping our records."

"We only have whatever we sent you."

And then the one that should stop a career cold. The department, he said, is "required by policy, anytime you destroy documents, to make a copy," one for the box, one for the division that's over the unit. And then this: "that's the issue we have, is not just with VCAT records, but a lot of records. We don't have any record of that."

Read it twice, because they're counting on you reading it zero times. The man in charge of the records admitted, on audio recording, in 2023, that his agency destroyed or lost public records, that the law required it to log every destruction and keep copies, and that it didn't. Not for one file. For a lot of them.

Here's why that isn't a shrug and a "sorry, our filing's a mess." When you destroy public records the right way, you leave a trail on purpose. You log it. You keep the copy. You can hand a judge the piece of paper that says this record was destroyed, on this date, under this schedule, by this person. That trail is the whole difference between housekeeping and a cover-up. And he told the public, three years ago, that the trail isn't there. No log. No copy. No record of the destruction. For a lot of records.

It gets worse when you read them their own rule. The retention policy he leaned on keeps these records for a set stretch of time unless litigation is ongoing. Litigation was ongoing. Requests were pending. Preservation notices had gone out and been acknowledged. So even the innocent version, the "they just aged out" version, doesn't survive their own policy, because their own policy says you stop the clock the second somebody's asking. Somebody kept shredding anyway, or never kept the records to begin with, and then mailed a citizen a "no records" letter like the empty drawer was an alibi.

Arkansas has a word for knowingly destroying or hiding a public record to keep it out of reach. It's tampering with a public record, and it's a felony under Ark. Code Ann. section 5-54-121. I'm not asking you to take my word for anybody's intent. I'm asking the one question the tape forces: when the records that would've documented a cop's conduct are the exact records that vanished, without a scrap of the paperwork the law demands to prove they went lawfully, who's still calling that an accident? Let a special prosecutor with no dog in the fight answer it under oath.

This is a cover-up and not a clerical error, and why it isn't LRPD's alone. That 2023 admission didn't stay locked inside LRPD. The Pulaski County Sheriff's Office has a copy of it. When I brought my complaint to the Sheriff's Office, the hard part was already done for them. LRPD's own lieutenant, on tape, had already said the records were gone and the required paper trail never existed. The case was, for all practical purposes, already made:

So what did the Sheriff's Office do with a case that was already made? It buried it. The detective who first handled it looked at a matter where the proof was sitting right there, gave it a one-paragraph brush-off, and declined to investigate, the same day. You do not refuse to investigate a case this easy unless investigating is the last thing you want. Read it the only way it honestly reads: the work was already done, a real look would have confirmed what LRPD had admitted and put the word felony on the table, and he saw me coming.

And when I forced the matter back open years later, the Sheriff's own Professional Standards Unit investigator went looking and admitted the same thing LRPD had: the records were missing or destroyed, with no record of destruction. So their own people confirmed it twice. Once by admission, and once by burial. Two agencies. One story. The records that mattered are gone, and everyone who touched this decided you were better off not knowing.

This is why a records fight is not a paperwork hobby. Secrecy is a form of power, and transparency is the counter-power. There's no community safety without community knowledge. An agency that decides for itself what you may see, that investigates itself, that loses the files exactly when the answers would embarrass it, and that sits on another agency's confession for three years, is not accountable to you. It is sovereign over you. The Freedom of Information Act is one of the few tools that flips that, at least on paper: the records belong to the people, and the burden of secrecy sits with the state. Who gets to know, and who gets to decide what is known, is a survival question, and we're answering it in the open.

So here is what I've done and what comes next. On 08/14/2026 I filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins and Pulaski County, case number 60CV-26-10583, to compel what is left of these records and to make the agency account, item by item, for anything it still withholds. I've asked for a criminal referral to a prosecutor with no reason to look away. And I've opened a citizen transparency audit of the same Sheriff's Office, from the codes it uses to close cases quietly, to its destruction logs, to the money. We don't audit out of curiosity. We audit to establish that the authority here belongs to the people, and to surface what the state would rather we never assemble in one place.

There's a lesson in the method, especially for the comrades doing the patient inside work. This front wasn't opened with a bullhorn. It was opened with a case number, a statute, a recording the government forgot I had, and a refusal to get tired. That discipline is political work, and it asks each of us to do the thing our position makes possible, and to do it well.

So spare me the form letter. You don't get to burn the evidence, hold the confession for three years, and then point at the empty drawer as your defense. The recording's public. The admission's on tape. The statute's on the books. The only thing actually missing, fittingly, is any record that this was ever done the right way. We'll see whether the court honors its own clock, and whether a prosecutor has the spine to ask the obvious question. Either way, we'll tell you what happens.

ALL Power to ALL People.