Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!"]

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.

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-...

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.

You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234721