Chief Noble Wray should follow up by easing up on the department's tendency to withhold too much information from the public about high-profile incidents.

The proof of the department's overreliance on secrecy came this week when a mistake allowed long-sealed search warrants to become public in the unsolved case of Brittany Zimmermann, murdered in her Downtown apartment on April 2.

Police had previously insisted that the warrants should be kept sealed so they could use the information privately to help them in their investigation. Even the Zimmermann family, which tried to obtain case records, was kept in the dark.

But when the warrants became public after police and the District Attorney's Office forgot to request continued secrecy, police suddenly decided secrecy wasn't necessary after all.

"These are old search warrants," Police Capt. Mary Schauf told the State Journal. "They aren't going to have any long-term effect on where we are going in the case."

State law requires public agencies, including the police department, to keep their information public, with important exceptions.

There are good reasons for information to be public. The Zimmermann case is an example.

The first reason is public safety. When a killer is on the loose, members of the public deserve a maximum of information so they can take precautions for their own protection.

The warrants revealed details about how Zimmermann was killed that could be useful to the public.

The second reason is public policy. The murder raised critical questions about Dane County's 911 center, which bungled an emergency call from Zimmermann's cell phone at the time she was murdered.

The public and its policymakers need to know what happened so they can prepare an adequate plan to fix what went wrong at the 911 center.

The warrants revealed that the mishandled 911 call contained a woman's scream and sounds of a struggle, according to police. They also revealed that 48 minutes elapsed before police were sent to Zimmermann's apartment.

At stake is public trust in calls to 911.

There is reason to keep information secret when release would jeopardize the possibility of catching the suspect.

But efforts by the Madison police to withhold information are all too common and all too unjustifiable, as the Zimmermann case shows. The case of Kelly Nolan is another example. Nolan's body was found south of Madison 18 months ago, two weeks after she disappeared after partying on State Street. Police have still not revealed the cause of her death or a motive for the crime.

It's time for Madison police to accept what they, themselves, concluded in the Zimmermann case: Most of the secrecy is unnecessary.

Give the public the information they need to make safety and policy decisions.