People keep missing the point that this has nothing to do with FOIA, it has to do with open records laws. The only thing that was released was a single redacted police report. The personal information of all juveniles was blocked out, and the current sequence of events was gleaned through simple inference.
I work with a Police Department. *Any *person at *any *time can request *any *police report, as long as they produce a fee. A juvenile’s criminal history is hidden from the public record, but individual crimes are not. Let’s take a hypothetical situation: a juvenile shoots and kills someone, and the media requests a report. The media would be presented with an incident report with all the information about the juvenile redacted. However, they would still be able to pierce together the sequence of the events from the narrative, and the non-redacted adult parties in the case.
Bottom line: you can hide information on individuals, but you can’t hide information on the crimes themselves.