LITTLE ROCK — More than 100 nonexistent ZIP codes that were on the public list of concealed handgun licensees have been fixed, an Arkansas State Police spokesman said Tuesday.
The changes were made after state police staff members reviewed a list of permit holders that had erroneous ZIP codes that had been identified by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week.
Data entry mistakes and incorrect ZIP codes listed by applicants on online and paper forms accounted for the errors, state police spokesman Bill Sadler said.
“There is nothing to indicate the errors were anything but innocent mistakes,” Sadler wrote in an e-mailed statement.
“The state police is on record readily confirming that errors were found in some of the ZIP codes transferred to the public list. However, these mistakes listed on the public list never compromised the integrity of the separate and distinct master database used for licensing and law enforcement purposes,” he said.
The state police’s response Tuesday came after the newspaper published an article Sunday reporting that 116 of the 865 ZIP codes on the public list of concealed handgun licensees didn’t exist. The 116 invalid ZIP codes represents only 134 licensees, which are a 10th of 1 percent of approximately 130,000 permit holders.
Every one of the permit holders with an invalid ZIP code on the public list was licensed “consistent with state laws and administrative procedures,” Sadler said.
“No one received a concealed-handgun license who shouldn’t have a license,” he said.
The newspaper found the problematic ZIP codes in the public database of the concealed-handgun licensees after obtaining the list on Jan. 23 under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. The state open-records law mandates that state policemake publicly available a list of the first and last names and ZIP codes of licensees.
A bill that would ban the public release of these last two pieces of information about concealed-handgun permit holders passed in the state Senate last week and is now assigned to the House Judiciary Committee.
State police had been aware of problematic ZIP codes in the public list since January 2008, Sadler said last week, but had assumed that errors would be “self-correcting” as permit holders renewed their licenses every five years.
On Feb. 8, the Democrat-Gazette provided Sadler with a list of erroneous entries in the public list, and the state police concealed-handgun-licensing staff began reviewing the listed permit-holders’ files. The review concluded Tuesday.
Of the 134 license holders with incorrect postal codes, 75 had incorrect ZIP codes listed because of data-entry mistakes. Another 58 of the errors “were attributed to applicant entries on a written form or online application,” Sadler said.
One permit holder with an invalid ZIP code no longer has a license, he said.
Among those 58 errors identified from applicant forms were three licensees that the state police has marked as correct “since the numbers were provided by the applicant and the state police has no cause to dispute the licensee information,” Sadler said.
The three licensees listed three ZIP codes that aren’t valid, according to the U.S. Postal Service, and include one with the 75502 ZIP code.
The 75502 ZIP code was highlighted in the newspaper’s Sunday article, and the state police corrected the ZIP code for two of three license holders who were mentioned but not named in the article.
According to a 1997 article by The Associated Press, the 75502 ZIP code was phased out in the mid-1990s. The change alleviated confusion about an Arkansas portion of Texarkana having a Texas-style ZIP code, according to the AP. Southwest Arkansas ZIP codes near Texarkana typically have prefixes of 71, while the nearby portions of Texas have ZIP codes with 75 prefixes.
The public would not have access to a licensees’ name or ZIP code if a bill in a state House committee becomes law.
The bill, Senate Bill 131, would close off all public information about concealedhandgun licensees and undo a compromise that legislators approved in 2009 that allowed the names and ZIP codes of licensees to be released under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Bruce Holland, R-Greenwood, has called the bill a “privacy issue” and said he filed it after a Little Rock doctor voiced concerns about a New York newspaper’s publication late last year of the names and addresses of concealed-handgun permit holders in that state.
Arkansas senators who voted against the bill have said that closing off the names and ZIP codes of concealed handgun licensees to only law enforcement officials unnecessarily takes away valuable public information.
Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, has said he’s against the bill but has declined to say whether he would veto it.
“He remains against the bill. He feels that the 2009 compromise that was reached to redact the street addresses but leave names and ZIP codes was a good compromise to protect permit owners and the people’s right to know,” Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said Tuesday. “He has not seen anything in the last four years that would necessitate a change to that.”
Sadler said an updated full list of concealed-handgun licensees’ names and ZIP codes would be publicly available later this week.
“Whether the public list goes away with this legislation that is proposed or continues to stay part of the landscape of the concealed-handgun licensing operations under the provision of the FOI, we’ll make every effort to always ensure as best we can that the ZIP codes and names are correct compared to the concealedhandgun licensing database,” he said.
“That ZIP code, it’s important to you. We realize that. It’s your last means to try to connect some dots. To the state police, it is merely a means to comply with the postal service ... to ensure that a letter gets to a delivery point,” he added. “It’s not a law enforcement tool.”
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/13/2013