Having been on the other side, the delay may not be a deliberate strategy.
Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.
This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.
I can tell you that I worked at a local government many many years ago and purposefully delaying or charging a lot for open records requests the entity did not want to complete is absolutely something that was discussed and employed internally. Almost certainly there is malicious intent here, you are giving them too much benefit of doubt.
I'd say "failing to train or staff anyone to handle an important legal duty" still falls under malice, perhaps just slightly higher up the chain of command.
You can only make a FOIA request to the US government.
I should think it obvious that yes, every department should in fact be staffed to a level that allows them to comply with this (and all other) legal obligations. Doing otherwise is obviously malicious.
This law was passed last century, back in 1966. It's not like this is some surprising new obligation that they failed to staff against.
The federal Freedom of Information Act is limited in that way, but people very frequently use this term as a catchall for similar state laws. The source article is about a request made to a local police agency, not funded by the state, under Oregon open records laws; the parent comment is talking about a local school district that almost certainly fills the same dynamic and certainly wouldn’t be federal.
You are aware that, in the article, the Oregon Police are the ones charging a news outlet money, right?
Like, technically these requests cost nothing, because they pass the costs on - and because in this case, they've presented an absurd cost to avoid having to do anything at all
I feel like local agencies, if they come up with something like this above a certain reasonable threshold should have to explain in exact detail on public record the procedure that’s taking so long or what is so expensive. After all, if it’s legitimate, they should have no problem doing that, right? If it’s hard, open your books and show us why
Of course, but the fact that there are two possibilities does not mean that they are equally probable. The GP "worked at a local government" and they say that "delaying or charging a lot was [...] employed internally."
These are independent events someone saying something about something else does not influence the probabilty that something was malicous. The event already occured. I think the original person is just question the probability of something malicously being 100% to be flawed thinking/misattributed. :)
Having got out of traffic tickets, it may be deliberate. If they don't respond at all within 30 days you can argue due process violation, but by slow dripping they can drag it out and not hit that timer. The 30 day period is telling.
Like another commenter, I've also been on the other side, and there was open discussion about how to delay responses or leave incriminating information out of them.
I remember specific examples of figuring out spurious legal objections to raise that would immediately fall if challenged, but would take months to challenge. I also remember people using records retention policies as 1) an excuse to destroy records that were still held, and pretending like they had been destroyed in the past, and 2) actively changing them in order to destroy things that had been requested, but maybe the request had been withdrawn to be resubmitted. I, as the IT person, remember being asked to come up with technical reasons why something could not be done, or would be expensive to do.
Related: I remember my innocence as an eager little guy in one of his earliest professional jobs, installing a system that would make everybody's email easily searchable if a subpoena or a FOIA had to be responded to, and the sheer panic and chaos that ensued. The solution was to install a chat that instantly dumped history and was not searchable, and to have a lot more face to face meetings.
Hanlon's Razor is a corruption enabler that only resonates because people confuse it with Occam's Razor. Occam was a logician; Hanlon's Razor was some bullshit submitted to a jokebook, and nobody knows who "Hanlon" is supposed to refer to.
Okay, what about spoonfeeding the records? If they got access to part 1/N, why did that not entail full access to the data? Otherwise they wouldn’t even be able to chunk it in the first place, no?
Just a guess. If the facts explained in those records prescribe after four years, agents must be tempted to release the part N/N in four years and a day. Without knowing the full history any demand could be dismissed.
Not different than nuclear companies adamantly repeating for the first years that no one was killed by a nuclear accident.
because someone has to go through those records and manually redact things they cannot legally disclose. Figure out what is responsive. What should be removed because it's not actually related to the request. ETc.
Also they didn't get access to part 1/n. They got access to part 1/?. And then 2/?. And then 3/?.
No way. You turn over everything and counsel does the privilege review.
I spent decades in public service. When the administration was into transparency, average time to response was <4 weeks, some within hours. When I retired, we turned off the system that tracked the requests.
But as I’m sure you’re more intimately familiar with, decisions are made and priorities set and folks like you are presented with sometimes unreasonable expectations to perform, or not. The police dept in question is clearly in the latter category.
In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.
I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.
It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.
And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.
Eh, I'd say it's way more complex than that. State agencies are under budget and staffing constraints just like regular businesses. Every employee tends to have more work than they can finish, and tax payers don't want to increase funding or want to actively lower it.
It’s definitely deliberate. It’s not like this is a natural phenomenon. The only question is who makes the choice and whether it’s a choice specifically to make the FOIA process painful or merely not to give it enough resources and priority.
It's deliberate but not malicious. Like when my kids ask for a new toy. Saying no because we can't afford it is deliberate but not malicious.
State agency resources are finite. I know my small town had to jack up property rates like crazy this year just to make its slim budget (it's the largest source of revenue, and the 2d is sales tax, which is unfortunately in the toilet thanks to several ruinous federal policies causing people to spend less and fewer people to come as tourists).
If we got FOIA requests, lol, it would take years to respond and would be so expensive. We don't even have a city attorney position. It's contracted out to a law firm because it's cheaper.
Some big FOIA request would cost us an insane amount of money through no fault of our own. Our voters don't want to pay higher taxes, so that's the state of things.
> Our voters don't want to pay higher taxes, so that's the state of things.
So the alternative is to act against the law and not answer FOIA requests?
You should demand high enough taxes to fulfill your obligations. If voters are unhappy about their height, they should elect people who make different laws the next time.
Often, as with the Eugene police in the source article, the voters who pass a requirement are not the same as the voters who have to approve funding to comply with it.
This is correct. I interned in the legal department for a large R1 university that was a state institution, and we got so many FOIA-style requests that we absolutely could not keep up.
You might think they're sandbagging you, but you aren't the center of the university. There are likely several pests who send hella requests for stupid stuff, cackling about how they're punishing bureaucrats for being bureaucrats. Plus all the legitimate requests that you don't even know about.
Like what are you requesting that is so voluminous, and why do you think you're so special that no one else is doing the same thing at the same time?
I’m with you and always the first to point out an alternative explanation
But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence
Yup, the Milwaukee PD took over 6 months for a fairly basic records request, and that was even with me following up monthly to ask them for an update. In the end, the only cost to me was <$5 for the 2GB flash drive they put the files on.
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
It's worse when they just deny the request with some bullshit non-applicable exemption.
Then you have to litigate it, which can take a couple of years because you have to have in camera reviews, motions and hearings, discovery, subpoena witnesses, trial etc. Then it's likely a county court you're in, so they're going to side with the public body and you'll need to run it through the appellate court, which adds another year or two before you finally get your records.
At this point, why won't you find 100 like-minded people and each of you file a FOIA request for 1/100th of the data? Instead of extending the deadline by another X each time they reply, all of the requests will have to be replied to within the same 1X, and with sufficiently small requests they won't be able to paginate.
If 4chan can find 100 like-minded people to search for HWNDU flag in a total wilderness, including volunteers to drive around and honk randomly, then HN can find 100 like-minded people to write a single email.
Also, isn't this how the contact-your-senator-about-this-horrible-bill campaigns work? And they seem to be fairly successful, at least in the "contact" part.
I think you grossly overestimate how long it takes to copy-paste an email, especially in the age of AI - as well as underestimate the entertainment value of making bureaucracy squirm. And if the FOIA request makes sense in the first place, I believe the inclination would be self-evident (exposing corruption, holding government employees accountable, undermining big corps' exclusive access to information, preserving local history, etc.)
And this is when you get on each and every single school board meeting agenda and sit in on every single public meeting available.
You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.
Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.
They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.
School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.
People are starting to figure that out with the ALPR / Data Center pushback. There’s a lot of cities that have gone by without much public oversight. I know here the people that started showing up have picked up on things that would have gone under the radar. Local politics matter!
Haha, Bay Area agencies are truly amazing. When a driver (negligently, in my opinion, considering that she lied about what happened) derailed a muni train, I asked for what actions were taken as a result and the only thing that was provided was that a hearing was performed.
I don’t mind waiting but I think I’d prefer paying for faster results. BART took half a year to respond to how they calculate on-time rating but they did finally give me the answer. It had some interesting properties (canceling trains leads to higher on-time performance if trains are late) and I wrote it up here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/BART_On-Time_Metric
I’ve often wonder if cancelling trains (and busses) would make them on time more in practice too, by queuing theory. If you just let them run late, that starts to compounds until you get a Bernoulli distribution (exponential arrival delays) as the system becomes unstable. If canceling a train means the next one can run actually on time, then the system is forced back towards stability with predictable reliable times. Sure you had to miss one slot, but in the alternative scheme where everyone is late, you miss every slot — and average wait times are doubled in an exponential process compared to a periodic system that sometimes skips an entire train intentionally.
Only if the expected ridership of each train is less than half full: otherwise the people still have the accumulating delay because they can’t get on a train that’s full even if it’s on time.
Even so, it'd be better to lose a small fraction of trains than make them all late, since have 2x trains at 2x intervals operates at much lower efficiency (with the first train being over capacity, taking much longer for people to get off and on, and the second train half empty -- unloading feels almost quadratic in the size of the stack of people to push and pop). Of course, yes, that assumes you can ensure it's only a small fraction of trains being skipped and that each train is big enough and scheduled frequently enough to move the expected passengers. Those seem like different problems to solve though, once the trains aren't allowed to run late.
> the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04.
It would be absolutely hilarious to follow up the absurd response with a public records request for all documentation around how they calculated that sum.
Yeah, that's begging for a lawsuit compelling them to produce the requested records.
44,000 hours? For one individual? What are they doing, transcribing with quill pens, and they first have to capture and pluck a bunch of geese in order to get the quills? Even that shouldn't take anything like that long. I can't see any way that such a number is justifiable; they should certainly be force to justify it.
Fun fact: when a record is created by a government agency, it's done with the expectation that it's going to be FOIA'd. The failure of the agency to maintain records in a way that allows the public to FOIA for their documents is an inexcusable failure by the police agency.
Also, there are many ways to simplify review and redaction processes such that it doesn't cost millions of dollars.
Worth pointing out that Germany is having an ongoing battle over our FOIA equivalent, in which a host of people who were bitten badly by it (most notably Jens Spahn) are proposing to allow exactly this kind of prohibitive fee, as well as reducing access to natural persons (so the individual reporter, not the newspaper) and only to people who have a reasonable interest, etc.
Sure, the current form of the law has some issues on the receiving end, but boy is this an obvious move to cover their own corruption better...
This is comparatively a bargain compared to what the DoD wanted to charge:
> In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
This is clearly hostile to the idea of civilian oversight, but the absurd scale of it is rather funny to me.
If you put $100 into US Treasury bonds (and for approximation's sake, say they have a 1% annual yield) then after 1700 years you would have 2.2 billion. And of course, if the US collapses before then, they wouldn't be able to collect on the FOIA fee anyway.
Statutes in the USA have even shorter timescales than that, but it doesn't stop the public bodies doing all sorts of end-run-arounds to avoid it.
And when they do violate your timescales, whatchagonnadoaboutit? It's technically a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, but no prosecutor in their right mind is going to bring the case. Which means you have to litigate it in civil courts and now you're four years deep and you've taken 73 days out of your work to attend court dates that end in continuances.
[The worst thing is, in Illinois it is a "civil penalty" for violating the FOIA; one State's Attorney was honest with me - "I don't care when I lose, we just write out a check to ourselves. Out one account, into the other!"]
Any corrupt organization anywhere will do its very best to protect itself from reputational loss whenever possible. It just happens that in some societies, the amount of protection those organizations can provide to themselves without quick consequences is much higher than in others.
In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.
That surprises me. When I worked in the Uk in a regulated industry, I observed it is very risk averse and process focused. I'm surprised the government can consistently turn around a response in 30 days.
The UK FOIA law only requires the government to acknowledge the request within 30 days. Not to actually fulfill it. In reality it is much, much slower and incomplete than the OP suggested.
USA states have their own public records laws on top of federal FOIA laws. The national FOIA law is basically the same as UK.
In this case, they are using the Oregon Public Records Law to drag their feet. Other states have better laws, or worse depending on which side of the information the state's voters are more keen on protecting.
There's no one standard because it depends on if you're talking about federal FOIA requests or laws for one of the 50 states. And they're different.
A big difference is that so many positions that in the UK would be civil servants are elected positions in the US or are appointed and possibly confirmed by a legislative body. That means that so many positions down to the local level in the UK are political. Even if the position isn't political, the person in that job might be hoping to gain one of those positions one day.
We famously have a Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples because it was, she argued, against her faith [1]. That should be unacceptable from any person fulfilling a government function. If something is against your faith, don't do that job. Or leave your faith at the door when you go to work. So many other places that just wouldn't happen.
But this infects a lot of state and local government functions too where sheriffs and DAs are elected positions and there have been cases where they simply won't investigate or prosecute certain cases. This was a real problem as civil rights activists were the victims of violence in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody would get prosecuted.
On top of all of that, many people who one day want to run for office want to be perceived as "tough on crime" so they back the police even when doing so is indefensible.
Back to FOIA, depending on what laws are applicable, there are often laws about deadlines for a response and limitations on cost, being only reasonable labor and materials. Yet agencies will slow walk FOIA requests, sail right through deadlines and, as in this case, come up with ridiculous cost estimates to comply.
But increasingly in the US, particularly at the federal level, people responsible will just flagrantly break the law because there will be no consequences.
This has forced a lot of people to file what in the US are called (writ of) mandamus lawsuits. This is when you ask a judge to force an agency to do something they're supposed to do anyway. Really what you're doing is forcing them to explain themselves to a judge. It shouldn't be necessary but it is.
The US has always been a bit backwards. We're the least progressive, most conservative, most plutocratic democracy. The system was designed to stymie structural reform. We had a few periods of "social reform" but a lot more enforcement of status quo by a wealthy elite class. Ironically it's supported by the voters, who're easily manipulated by a lack of political choice (which is reinforced by the structure). In 2 years it'll end the way the Roman Republic ended.
Munis and cops always lose these cases, at this point i think they need to be sanctioned for wasting courts' time. The problem is that nobody is personally liable so it all comes out of tax dollars.
An Oregon State official came on to a State of California zoom meeting as an invited speaker. The Zoom meeting was public, but niche.. maybe the man did not realize it, or maybe just had confidence. The Oregon State govt bureaucrat described in detail a two-layer system for storing certain public records, such that the records subject to Freedom of Information Act were "not available" to the public facing system. The bureaucrat said quote "this is designed to avoid public information requests". I assume that he thought he was in a closed meeting of California bureaucrats to use such language openly.
This story gets even more interesting when you pull out other sources:
> During a Thursday, Oct. 8, meeting of the Eugene Police Commission, Chief Chris Skinner said: “We reached out to the requester, gave them a heads-up that it was going to be a big number, and asked them if they’d like to collaborate with us on how they can narrow their scope, change their scope, get them to yes on something to release that, and they chose not to do that.”
But James Croxton, editor-in-chief for Double Sided Media, in an email Friday to Lookout Eugene-Springfield said police never made such an offer, describing how managing editor Mary Bell called to follow up on the initial request and was told by a records supervisor that the number of potentially responsive documents was 2.6 million.
“The call lasted for 5 minutes and 11 seconds and there was no offer to help narrow the scope or anything of the sort,” Croxton said Friday.
> Double Sided Media sought “[all] completed internal affairs complaints, intake logs, investigative summaries, witness interviews, audio/video evidence logs, and disciplinary notices issued to or involving Justin Peckels where findings of misconduct were ‘sustained,’” with the request covering an eight-year time period, June 18, 2018, through July 30, 2026.
The request also sought “[a]ll internal and external communications, correspondence, and logs sent, received, or maintained by EPD’s executive staff — specifically including Police Chief Chris Skinner and Deputy Chief — dated between June 18, 2018, and July 30, 2026, regarding any misconduct investigations, internal status, negotiations, discipline, stipulation, or certification of Justin Peckels.”
—
Contrast that with this statement from the posted article:
> The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
—
Charitably, Justin Peckels’ supervisory bandwidth appears to be roughly 12x that of another officer.
Should be obvious why any correspondence related to something over an 8 year span is expensive. To fulfill that you have to read or at least glance at every single email.
You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.
The publication isn’t being dishonest - they openly published (in a post linked from the source article https://doublesidedmedia.com/2026/09/30/editorial-the-eugene...) the text of their two requests including the date ranges. They just don’t seem to understand the complexities of doing a detailed record search with broad criteria.
Is there no organisation with power to police this? In the UK we have the ICO and if we're not satisfied with the response to a FOIA request we can escalate it to them.
It's why the Attorney General is an elected office in my state. If enough people make it public enough that they aren't upholding the law, we can tank their political aspirations. Makes them less beholden to the governor too.
The ownership class, and thus the courts and lawmakers actively protect the police, which function as an armed gang to enforce the status quo for the ownership class.
This idea that this is an outrage or will be remedied in courts is a silly one. This is the system working as intended. The people in a city who decide which laws get made want at least one guy who will come and punch you in the face for protesting or making noise or whatever.
At some point, we need to face the functional corruption of many of our basic institutions. Defund/Abolish the Police tried to force that reckoning, but no one wanted to hear it. This, in the same country that dismantled many of its own public school systems when racial integration was ordered, proving that such sweeping changes are possible when there is the will and funding behind it.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.
People wanted it, the protests were historically big. It’s billionaires, the politicians they buy, and the people influenced by the media they own that are opposed.
Well, it _is_ an opportunity for someone in Eugene who is willing to run for city council. Whoever is currently in that seat would either have to defend the police department (which for this issue would look pretty bad), or they would lean on the police department too, which _would_ be helpful.
I've been reading these stories and I'm completely flabbergasted.
Here in EU when there is a public office, there's a right to access the public record. Anyone can file a request, and the office has a given time frame to respond.
Sure, they can do mental gymnastics and stall as much as they want, but there's no money involved. Ever. And if they stall too much you can go to court.
A public office is founded by tax money, by us, and the idea that I would have to pay for publicly available information (public as in not confidential) is beyond me.
In the health care industry, it is apparent that the goal now is to generate such voluminous internal EHRs that any records request by a layperson will drown them in documents, for example, 400pp corresponding to a 3-day hospital visit.
This generation of excess documentation also permits charging the maximum, even when the output is simply an enormous, unwieldy PDF.
Furthermore, many of the textual pages will consist of TIFF images, being unsearchable and unparsable. Good luck with OCR.
I think you’re misattributing the problem here. Open records laws generally do not permit people to say “well, this is a trivial record, so we’re going to exclude it from the search so as to not drown laypeople”. Anything that’s written down is a record, so as more communication moves from in-person conversations and phone calls to messaging apps, everyone has a lot of records.
Sort of. But you may have to fire most of the police force first. They lean pretty hard to the right and as soon as a left leaning politician tries to hold them to any accountability they immediately respond by turning their backs (sometimes literally) on the public and their sworn responsibility. Basically bullying the public into voting out any politician that rocks the boat.
Requiring them to reside within city limits and be as educated as the median city employee would eliminate needing to fire anyone.
The residents of Eugene may be regarded as left leaning
(as in peaceful, go along get along) but that appears to also mean
naive and easily manipulated.
I've been thinking about this a bit, and I think the only real answer is to have some alternate body of trustworthy people constituting an armed but unofficial Civil Guard (or whatever you want to call it) waiting in the wings to take over the maintenance of order when a sympathetic Sheriff or City Council fires the whole police apparatus at once. They would then be deputized/sworn in/officialized, and they could keep order and disarm the old cops while a permanent new force is set up. This is admittedly a dangerous situation to put one's local community in -- especially without backing from the Feds or the statehouse -- but I don't see a way around it.
The only alternative would be a whisper campaign to suss out the trustworthy pockets within the existing police apparatus, but that is probably even more dangerous. Imagine the police chief in your city going public with information that there is a left wing plot to overthrow order from within the police department!
I'm looking at this from across the pond, and I'm not convinced that's true. From here it looks like you have a choice between voting for the liar who says things you don't like, or the liar who says things you like. Neither will do what they say.
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
> I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
You only have visibility through a lens that is intentionally showing you only the most click-worthy perspective. In real life there are plenty of people trying to do what they believe is right. But it's hard, thankless work, because even when they succeed someone or another will claim they are biased, etc.
I had a vague suspicion this could be, and it's good to hear. I feel like Americans are incredibly cynical and pessimistic about themselves and the USA
You are correct in EU politicians being liars and corruption, though I want to mention the recent events in Hungary, and our fight against corruption and the corrupt politicians, many of them have been arrested after almost 2 decades of no accountability. There is hope, it seems! I would have never expected this to happen. Seems like our new PM and Govt wants to be on the good side of the history books.
The left is supposed to be about police reform. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reacting like a hit dog simply to the phrase "hyper left leaning."
If you identify as being on the left, you should identify with wanting the police to answer FOIA requests, and you should be happy to be associated with this.
When more people vote for the less corrupt party, both parties move further away from corruption and remain the same as each other, following Duverger's law.
I sent a public records request to my local school district on March 9th 2026.
They responded on 19th March 2026 saying they'd respond on in late April.
Since then, every month they've sent an email with some small portion of the records, with a PDF letter saying they'll send a follow up a month later.
I've received 8 of those responses so far, and there's no indication when, if ever, I will have received all the records responsive to my request.
Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.
This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.
You can only make a FOIA request to the US government.
I should think it obvious that yes, every department should in fact be staffed to a level that allows them to comply with this (and all other) legal obligations. Doing otherwise is obviously malicious.
This law was passed last century, back in 1966. It's not like this is some surprising new obligation that they failed to staff against.
Like, technically these requests cost nothing, because they pass the costs on - and because in this case, they've presented an absurd cost to avoid having to do anything at all
It's equally as certain (not very certain) you're attributing malicious intent where there is none. They're both real possibilities.
Of course, but the fact that there are two possibilities does not mean that they are equally probable. The GP "worked at a local government" and they say that "delaying or charging a lot was [...] employed internally."
That moves the needle back towards “may not be deliberate”.
Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).
The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.
One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.
I remember specific examples of figuring out spurious legal objections to raise that would immediately fall if challenged, but would take months to challenge. I also remember people using records retention policies as 1) an excuse to destroy records that were still held, and pretending like they had been destroyed in the past, and 2) actively changing them in order to destroy things that had been requested, but maybe the request had been withdrawn to be resubmitted. I, as the IT person, remember being asked to come up with technical reasons why something could not be done, or would be expensive to do.
Related: I remember my innocence as an eager little guy in one of his earliest professional jobs, installing a system that would make everybody's email easily searchable if a subpoena or a FOIA had to be responded to, and the sheer panic and chaos that ensued. The solution was to install a chat that instantly dumped history and was not searchable, and to have a lot more face to face meetings.
Hanlon's Razor is a corruption enabler that only resonates because people confuse it with Occam's Razor. Occam was a logician; Hanlon's Razor was some bullshit submitted to a jokebook, and nobody knows who "Hanlon" is supposed to refer to.
Just a guess. If the facts explained in those records prescribe after four years, agents must be tempted to release the part N/N in four years and a day. Without knowing the full history any demand could be dismissed.
Not different than nuclear companies adamantly repeating for the first years that no one was killed by a nuclear accident.
Also they didn't get access to part 1/n. They got access to part 1/?. And then 2/?. And then 3/?.
I spent decades in public service. When the administration was into transparency, average time to response was <4 weeks, some within hours. When I retired, we turned off the system that tracked the requests.
Yes, and having been the counsel that does the review, it can be painstakingly laborious.
But as I’m sure you’re more intimately familiar with, decisions are made and priorities set and folks like you are presented with sometimes unreasonable expectations to perform, or not. The police dept in question is clearly in the latter category.
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.
I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.
It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.
And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.
State agency resources are finite. I know my small town had to jack up property rates like crazy this year just to make its slim budget (it's the largest source of revenue, and the 2d is sales tax, which is unfortunately in the toilet thanks to several ruinous federal policies causing people to spend less and fewer people to come as tourists).
If we got FOIA requests, lol, it would take years to respond and would be so expensive. We don't even have a city attorney position. It's contracted out to a law firm because it's cheaper.
Some big FOIA request would cost us an insane amount of money through no fault of our own. Our voters don't want to pay higher taxes, so that's the state of things.
So the alternative is to act against the law and not answer FOIA requests? You should demand high enough taxes to fulfill your obligations. If voters are unhappy about their height, they should elect people who make different laws the next time.
You might think they're sandbagging you, but you aren't the center of the university. There are likely several pests who send hella requests for stupid stuff, cackling about how they're punishing bureaucrats for being bureaucrats. Plus all the legitimate requests that you don't even know about.
Like what are you requesting that is so voluminous, and why do you think you're so special that no one else is doing the same thing at the same time?
But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
It cost them over $31,000 to fight over a few minor emails because the district business adminstrator was mildly embarrassed by them.
> https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/anonymous-police-id-num...
Then you have to litigate it, which can take a couple of years because you have to have in camera reviews, motions and hearings, discovery, subpoena witnesses, trial etc. Then it's likely a county court you're in, so they're going to side with the public body and you'll need to run it through the appellate court, which adds another year or two before you finally get your records.
HN logic is so entertaining.
Also, isn't this how the contact-your-senator-about-this-horrible-bill campaigns work? And they seem to be fairly successful, at least in the "contact" part.
You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.
Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.
They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.
School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.
There usually is a fee for the amount of information, or for the scope of the search, lest they get spammed for low value drive-bys.
If the request was “anything anywhere anytime related to X” they could be expensive (millions is incredulous, but expensive).
If the request was “last 9 months arrest records by X” that is more scoped.
The article never says.
I don’t mind waiting but I think I’d prefer paying for faster results. BART took half a year to respond to how they calculate on-time rating but they did finally give me the answer. It had some interesting properties (canceling trains leads to higher on-time performance if trains are late) and I wrote it up here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/BART_On-Time_Metric
44k hours is ~21 years. Beyond absurd
44,000 hours? For one individual? What are they doing, transcribing with quill pens, and they first have to capture and pluck a bunch of geese in order to get the quills? Even that shouldn't take anything like that long. I can't see any way that such a number is justifiable; they should certainly be force to justify it.
Also, there are many ways to simplify review and redaction processes such that it doesn't cost millions of dollars.
Sure, the current form of the law has some issues on the receiving end, but boy is this an obvious move to cover their own corruption better...
> In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
(15 million hours = over 1700 years)
If you put $100 into US Treasury bonds (and for approximation's sake, say they have a 1% annual yield) then after 1700 years you would have 2.2 billion. And of course, if the US collapses before then, they wouldn't be able to collect on the FOIA fee anyway.
Just what in the hell is happening in the USA?
And when they do violate your timescales, whatchagonnadoaboutit? It's technically a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, but no prosecutor in their right mind is going to bring the case. Which means you have to litigate it in civil courts and now you're four years deep and you've taken 73 days out of your work to attend court dates that end in continuances.
[The worst thing is, in Illinois it is a "civil penalty" for violating the FOIA; one State's Attorney was honest with me - "I don't care when I lose, we just write out a check to ourselves. Out one account, into the other!"]
https://www.ukjournohub.com/foi/foi-refusals
In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.
They don't, e.g. [0], [1], [2], etc.
[0] https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
[1] https://neilwilby.com/2026/04/02/when-delay-becomes-denial-a...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/foi-department-for-int...
https://www.ukjournohub.com/foi/foi-deadlines
I've also experienced this many times personally. Acknowledgement is immediate, and the request is done just under the 20 day mark.
In this case, they are using the Oregon Public Records Law to drag their feet. Other states have better laws, or worse depending on which side of the information the state's voters are more keen on protecting.
A big difference is that so many positions that in the UK would be civil servants are elected positions in the US or are appointed and possibly confirmed by a legislative body. That means that so many positions down to the local level in the UK are political. Even if the position isn't political, the person in that job might be hoping to gain one of those positions one day.
We famously have a Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples because it was, she argued, against her faith [1]. That should be unacceptable from any person fulfilling a government function. If something is against your faith, don't do that job. Or leave your faith at the door when you go to work. So many other places that just wouldn't happen.
But this infects a lot of state and local government functions too where sheriffs and DAs are elected positions and there have been cases where they simply won't investigate or prosecute certain cases. This was a real problem as civil rights activists were the victims of violence in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody would get prosecuted.
On top of all of that, many people who one day want to run for office want to be perceived as "tough on crime" so they back the police even when doing so is indefensible.
Back to FOIA, depending on what laws are applicable, there are often laws about deadlines for a response and limitations on cost, being only reasonable labor and materials. Yet agencies will slow walk FOIA requests, sail right through deadlines and, as in this case, come up with ridiculous cost estimates to comply.
But increasingly in the US, particularly at the federal level, people responsible will just flagrantly break the law because there will be no consequences.
This has forced a lot of people to file what in the US are called (writ of) mandamus lawsuits. This is when you ask a judge to force an agency to do something they're supposed to do anyway. Really what you're doing is forcing them to explain themselves to a judge. It shouldn't be necessary but it is.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222810445/ex-kentucky-clerk-...
Now I understand more of the TV shows and films I've seen.
It isn't, so it's just normal Oregon behavior to have multiple news stories about police departments stonewalling transparency laws.
> During a Thursday, Oct. 8, meeting of the Eugene Police Commission, Chief Chris Skinner said: “We reached out to the requester, gave them a heads-up that it was going to be a big number, and asked them if they’d like to collaborate with us on how they can narrow their scope, change their scope, get them to yes on something to release that, and they chose not to do that.”
But James Croxton, editor-in-chief for Double Sided Media, in an email Friday to Lookout Eugene-Springfield said police never made such an offer, describing how managing editor Mary Bell called to follow up on the initial request and was told by a records supervisor that the number of potentially responsive documents was 2.6 million.
“The call lasted for 5 minutes and 11 seconds and there was no offer to help narrow the scope or anything of the sort,” Croxton said Friday.
(Source - https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/justice/2026/10/...)
—
Or a further quote from that article says:
> Double Sided Media sought “[all] completed internal affairs complaints, intake logs, investigative summaries, witness interviews, audio/video evidence logs, and disciplinary notices issued to or involving Justin Peckels where findings of misconduct were ‘sustained,’” with the request covering an eight-year time period, June 18, 2018, through July 30, 2026.
The request also sought “[a]ll internal and external communications, correspondence, and logs sent, received, or maintained by EPD’s executive staff — specifically including Police Chief Chris Skinner and Deputy Chief — dated between June 18, 2018, and July 30, 2026, regarding any misconduct investigations, internal status, negotiations, discipline, stipulation, or certification of Justin Peckels.”
—
Contrast that with this statement from the posted article:
> The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
—
Charitably, Justin Peckels’ supervisory bandwidth appears to be roughly 12x that of another officer.
You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.
This idea that this is an outrage or will be remedied in courts is a silly one. This is the system working as intended. The people in a city who decide which laws get made want at least one guy who will come and punch you in the face for protesting or making noise or whatever.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.
Here in EU when there is a public office, there's a right to access the public record. Anyone can file a request, and the office has a given time frame to respond.
Sure, they can do mental gymnastics and stall as much as they want, but there's no money involved. Ever. And if they stall too much you can go to court.
A public office is founded by tax money, by us, and the idea that I would have to pay for publicly available information (public as in not confidential) is beyond me.
This generation of excess documentation also permits charging the maximum, even when the output is simply an enormous, unwieldy PDF.
Furthermore, many of the textual pages will consist of TIFF images, being unsearchable and unparsable. Good luck with OCR.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234721
The residents of Eugene may be regarded as left leaning (as in peaceful, go along get along) but that appears to also mean naive and easily manipulated.
Lazzar for mayor!
The only alternative would be a whisper campaign to suss out the trustworthy pockets within the existing police apparatus, but that is probably even more dangerous. Imagine the police chief in your city going public with information that there is a left wing plot to overthrow order from within the police department!
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
You only have visibility through a lens that is intentionally showing you only the most click-worthy perspective. In real life there are plenty of people trying to do what they believe is right. But it's hard, thankless work, because even when they succeed someone or another will claim they are biased, etc.
If you identify as being on the left, you should identify with wanting the police to answer FOIA requests, and you should be happy to be associated with this.