Occasionally, there is information we want to get from government agencies that won't come to us through discovery or through the use of a subpoena duces tecum (that's a command from a court to a person or business to turn over certain documents to a party to a lawsuit). In those cases, we'll use a public records request. You might hear this called a "FOIA" request or an Open Records Request, which are essentially the same thing. But in Mississippi, we have a specific law that covers the public's access to government records, and it's known as the Mississippi Public Records Act of 1983. It's found in the Mississippi Code at Section 25-61-1, et seq.
What type of information is covered by the Mississippi Public Records Act? Well, things like dash cam videos of someone being escorted from a college campus to an airport by the Mississippi Highway Patrol, for example. So if for some reason you wanted that information, you would submit a request via the Mississippi Department of Public Safety's online public records system, known as NextRequest: https://mdpsms.nextrequest.com/
When you're using NextRequest, they'll ask you for the records you are requesting, and you want to be specific yet also broad enough to cover the entire possible timeline of what you are looking for. In the above example, you might want to phrase your request as follows:
On December 1, 2025, former Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin made the following assertions at his introductory press conference as the new football coach for Louisiana State University:1. "That airport scene, and Knox and I driving and people trying to run us off the road..."2. "They ain’t going to the airport and driving from all over, okay, to say those things and yell those things and try to run you off the road if you were doing bad."Please provide all video (dash camera or otherwise) recordings, audio recordings (radio dispatch or otherwise), and incident reports that support the assertions of Mr. Kiffin that people attempted to "run (him) off the road" as he made his way to the Oxford University Airport on November 30, 2025.Now, if something like this actually did occur and someone did attempt to run Mr. Kiffin's car off of the road, it likely would be treated as a criminal act by MHP, which would mean that some or all of the responsive records could be subject to an investigative exception. Or, if Mr. Kiffin wasn't being truthful in his statements, the response from DPS may simply be "No responsive records exist."
Happy hunting!