HARRISBURG -- State law and repeated court rulings make police blotters and incident reports public in Pennsylvania, but many departments still refuse to provide access to such information, a survey of more than 200 municipal and state police agencies found.

Roughly 60 percent of departments provided either immediate access to their blotters or other information about recent calls.

But the remainder did neither.

The findings, from a survey conducted in February by 51 news organizations and coordinated by The Associated Press, show state law has failed to ensure that the welcome mat is out when Pennsylvanians go to police stations to get information about police activity in their communities.

Even as some departments ticked off reasons for not providing access, others found no problem in producing chronological lists of calls.

Only nine of 55 state police stations provided a call log -- and state police officials later said the nine were wrong to do so.

The most common reason cited for not producing a blotter was that the department did not maintain one.

The president of the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association, Police Chief Russ McKibben in the suburban Pittsburgh borough of Dormont, said most departments should be able to generate such a list.

"I find it really easy to do if you have a records-management system that's worth its salt," he said. "It's very easy to run a blotter and not print everything you (don't) want to print, including victims' names and cases under investigation."

Ford City Police Chief Jan Lysakowski told a surveyor that she would need a subpoena or warrant to get the call log. In a follow-up interview, he softened that position and said the public could get information about particular incidents and "any arrests, anything like that."

But he made clear that the incident book that records all calls in Ford City, 35 northeast of Pittsburgh, is off-limits.

"We're protecting names and information on open investigations," he said.

The Pocono Township Police in Tannersville do not maintain a blotter, said Chief Rick Staples, who told a surveyor that he was only willing to release information about specified calls.

"We certainly have nothing to hide, but on the other hand some things could come back to bite us if we were to release everything on location and date and time," he said.

Lower Providence Township Police in Eagleville, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, cited concerns about privacy and ongoing investigations in withholding its log.

"There are rare occasions where we do release it, and that's in the case where it's subpoenaed for court purposes. And even under those conditions we blacken out any information that's investigative," Sgt. Daniel F. McCabe said.

The logs that were released provided a comprehensive index to police activity.

In sleepy Ephrata, police weren't dispatched to any violent crimes on Feb. 21 -- nothing even newsworthy -- but they kept busy.

The Lancaster County 911 center patched through 24 calls to the Ephrata Police that day, including a theft, a drug violation, a domestic disturbance, two animal complaints and three traffic stops.

Of the 217 departments surveyed, including 55 of the 90 state police field stations, about 40 percent provided no information about their recent activities, even though the state's Criminal History Record Information Law says blotters are public records. It defines them as "a chronological listing of arrests ... which may include, but is not limited to, the name and address of the individual charged and the alleged offenses."

Three Commonwealth Court rulings have further defined police blotters as "the equivalent of incident reports" or "a type of chronological compilation of original records of entry." In the most recent decision, the court reiterated in 1997 that incident reports are subject to public disclosure.

There are, however, loopholes.

Departments that denied access said they didn't keep such a record, that their log included investigative details, that it was too difficult to compile -- and even that it was not public information. The state's Right-to-Know Law permits public agencies to withhold records that "would operate to the prejudice or impairment of a person's reputation or personal security."

The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association has tried for years to improve access to police blotters, said Corinna Wilson, a media-law attorney with the industry group.

The PNA hoped to address the problem when the Right-to-Know Law was amended in 2002 but could not get anywhere on that issue, she said.

"When police departments take it upon themselves to withhold information that by statute is public, not only are they not following the law, they're really cheating their constituents, the members of their communities, of the right to plan and order their lives, to be safe," Wilson said.

Amy K. Corl, executive director of the 1,200-member Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association, said it makes sense to give departments the ability to limit what information they release.

"If my pocketbook is stolen, why do you need to know? Why do you need to know who I am and what has happened to me? I would think the public would want those records to be kept confidential," she said.

Doylestown Township Police Chief Stephen J. White said disclosure can help in many ways -- in helping solve crimes and in showing the public that police dollars are being well spent.

"Quite honestly, the police department's budget is a good portion of the overall municipal budget, and there's a lot of things the police department is doing that people wouldn't (otherwise) have knowledge of," said White, whose department is about 25 miles north of Philadelphia.

In Ambridge, northwest of Pittsburgh, Police Chief David Sabol said it's unrealistic to expect records to be produced on the spot. An officer in his department declined to produce the blotter during the survey, but Sabol said later he would release it if given time to black out sensitive information.

"We've got to be able to limit who we provide this information for. What ultimately would happen, I feel, is we would have a line of people standing here every day asking to review the reports. And that's just not physically possible," he said.

Police records that pertain to investigations -- the law makes no distinction between open and closed investigations -- are exempt from disclosure, and several departments declined to release their chronological call listing because it included such information.

State police say it is their policy to issue news releases for all arrests, criminal incidents and other activities of public interest, but not call logs, which they say could contain names of confidential informants.

A nine-page Automated Incident Memo System report obtained from the Carlisle state police station for Feb. 23 included mostly routine calls along with a couple of burglaries and a domestic dispute. Trooper Linette Quinn, a department spokeswoman, said later it was a mistake to release the report.

Quinn said troopers are instructed to produce news releases at the end of each shift, and that they are available to the public.