> 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.
44k hours is ~21 years. Beyond absurd
AnimalMuppet · 2026-10-25 19:30:26 UTC
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.
natebc · 2026-10-25 20:05:24 UTC
At that rate surely they started with just goose eggs.
nojvek · 2026-10-26 00:28:41 UTC
In US, police are gangsters. If you make a lawsuit, they come after you and intimidate. Who gonna police the police?
ProllyInfamous · 2026-10-27 10:35:02 UTC
>>"You may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride..."
I have paid a small five-figure sum defending myself against various contempt of cop charges (multiple alleged violations over the years); my last arrest was for 0.009 grams [†] of marijuana (literally a flake of potleaf), wherein my Texas defense attorney [0] laid it out clearly: "if the marijuana laws in Texas changed, *I'd be out of the job..!" (boo hoo).
[†] same Class B Misdemeanor for all possession between 0-1.9999 ounces
[0] former Travis County prosecutor, of course; at the time, this should not even have resulted in an arrest ("arrest and release" was the county policy), but Rollingwood gonna Rollingwood (the wealthiest suburb of Austin)
LorenPechtel · 2026-10-25 20:59:33 UTC
The time consuming part is probably redacting.
AnimalMuppet · 2026-10-25 21:03:57 UTC
21 man-years for redacting? For redacting one person's records? Still beyond absurd.
chaps · 2026-10-25 21:07:05 UTC
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.
thatguy00 · 2026-10-25 22:26:42 UTC
"Okay, I'd ALSO like the records on how you idiots came up with that ridiculous figure, and what company implemented the technology you use."
lsaferite · 2026-10-25 22:50:19 UTC
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.
I've been seeing more FOIA request costs going up, justice for those wealthy enough to pay for it, as per usual!
rahimnathwani · 2026-10-25 18:32:53 UTC
Some agencies have a different tactic: go really slowly.
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.
forsalebypwner · 2026-10-25 18:41:20 UTC
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)
toomuchtodo · 2026-10-25 18:41:34 UTC
Let muckrock.com know, they track this data when requests are made on their platform.
garciasn · 2026-10-25 18:44:49 UTC
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.
dawnerd · 2026-10-26 01:53:57 UTC
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!
Hnrobert42 · 2026-10-25 19:23:50 UTC
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.
rahimnathwani · 2026-10-25 19:25:53 UTC
"The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job."
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.
paulddraper · 2026-10-25 19:28:01 UTC
As in, the email was misrouted?
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
pixl97 · 2026-10-25 19:41:35 UTC
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.
paulddraper · 2026-10-25 19:43:07 UTC
So they’re busy.
wat10000 · 2026-10-25 21:33:55 UTC
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.
KPGv2 · 2026-10-26 03:37:43 UTC
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.
master-lincoln · 2026-10-26 11:08:29 UTC
> 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.
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-10-26 12:17:50 UTC
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.
paulddraper · 2026-10-26 19:09:52 UTC
A small town would have less data.
Hnrobert42 · 2026-10-25 19:42:41 UTC
In my case it is the latter.
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.
gxs · 2026-10-25 19:53:11 UTC
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
SOLAR_FIELDS · 2026-10-25 21:07:54 UTC
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.
loufe · 2026-10-26 01:46:35 UTC
It can be both, one situation to the next.
handoflixue · 2026-10-26 01:52:59 UTC
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.
KPGv2 · 2026-10-26 03:31:33 UTC
How about "failing to be rich enough to hire enough staff for all the FOIA requests that are made"?
handoflixue · 2026-10-26 04:29:15 UTC
"Rich enough"?
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.
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-10-26 12:14:54 UTC
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.
handoflixue · 2026-10-27 01:43:42 UTC
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
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-10-27 13:51:57 UTC
As is discussed in detail downthread, the presented cost is much less obviously absurd than the article makes it sound. Responding to the queries would require manual review and redaction of a gigantic number of documents, because the request was very broad in ways that make it nontrivial to automate. It might be better for the Eugene police to invest in some kind of record modernization that would let them handle such requests more efficiently, but I imagine the local townsfolk aren’t any more enthused than this local news outlet was by the prospect of paying for that.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 2026-10-26 18:54:48 UTC
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
nebezb · 2026-10-26 02:48:43 UTC
> Almost certainly there is malicious intent here, you are giving them too much benefit of doubt.
It's equally as certain (not very certain) you're attributing malicious intent where there is none. They're both real possibilities.
selcuka · 2026-10-26 05:30:16 UTC
> 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."
Someone · 2026-10-26 09:03:15 UTC
And the post they replied to said “Having been on the other side, the delay may not be a deliberate strategy.”
That moves the needle back towards “may not be deliberate”.
IAmBroom · 2026-10-26 13:47:41 UTC
No, it merely raises a possibility. It does not prove any likelihood.
xphos · 2026-10-26 17:33:39 UTC
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. :)
skinfaxi · 2026-10-26 08:13:08 UTC
Sorry, groups of people don't get the same deference as individuals.
pessimizer · 2026-10-25 22:41:50 UTC
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.
Cyph0n · 2026-10-25 23:06:46 UTC
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?
pvaldes · 2026-10-26 00:36:32 UTC
> what about spoonfeeding the records?
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.
KPGv2 · 2026-10-26 03:33:27 UTC
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/?.
billfor · 2026-10-26 01:13:58 UTC
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.
LoganDark · 2026-10-26 02:19:27 UTC
Acoustic slow loris attack, lol
Spooky23 · 2026-10-26 01:54:12 UTC
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.
KPGv2 · 2026-10-26 03:34:52 UTC
> You turn over everything and counsel does the privilege review.
Yes, and having been the counsel that does the review, it can be painstakingly laborious.
Spooky23 · 2026-10-26 11:29:32 UTC
Of course it can be.
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.
Hnrobert42 · 2026-10-26 23:29:07 UTC
Our counsel is profoundly incompetent.
KPGv2 · 2026-10-26 03:29:22 UTC
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?
test6554 · 2026-10-26 04:33:32 UTC
I would think that since it is a law to comply. It is required to fall within the scope of at least someone's responsibilities.
account42 · 2026-10-26 10:19:33 UTC
What you are describing is a deliberate strategy on the organization level.
paulddraper · 2026-10-25 19:36:31 UTC
Strangely, the article never posted what the request actually was.
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.
kotaKat · 2026-10-25 19:47:32 UTC
Took over a year for me and the NSA, so the benchmark is pretty slow. Ended up free, though.
genxy · 2026-10-25 22:00:07 UTC
What did you request? Did they post it, or only send it to you?
arjie · 2026-10-25 19:53:58 UTC
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
Barbing · 2026-10-25 22:01:57 UTC
Great work!
manwe150 · 2026-10-25 23:56:39 UTC
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.
lazyasciiart · 2026-10-26 05:12:33 UTC
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.
manwe150 · 2026-10-26 17:13:11 UTC
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.
kfichter · 2026-10-25 20:10:33 UTC
About 3 years now for the NYC government
Scubabear68 · 2026-10-25 21:16:32 UTC
My local school board fought an OPRA request in NJ for a followup on something they had responded to a few weeks before.
It cost them over $31,000 to fight over a few minor emails because the district business adminstrator was mildly embarrassed by them.
lotsofpulp · 2026-10-25 21:32:45 UTC
It cost taxpayers over $31k. It cost “them” nothing.
cowlevel · 2026-10-25 22:21:44 UTC
They had $31k less in their discretionary budget, and taxpayers paid the same.
voakbasda · 2026-10-26 15:28:49 UTC
So, they stole $31k from the children.
qingcharles · 2026-10-25 22:08:40 UTC
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.
nxobject · 2026-10-25 22:44:40 UTC
Also in Oregon (Portland), slow-walking the release of names associated with "identifiable" IDs:
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.
N_Lens · 2026-10-26 00:55:23 UTC
"100 like minded people"
HN logic is so entertaining.
Xirdus · 2026-10-26 01:33:31 UTC
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.
kelipso · 2026-10-26 01:56:34 UTC
Nobody has time or inclination to be part of your personal army unless it's entertaining lol.
Xirdus · 2026-10-26 05:33:47 UTC
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.)
rahimnathwani · 2026-10-26 01:41:14 UTC
I don't know what records I'm missing. I usually only know of the existence of a record once I've received it.
Xirdus · 2026-10-26 01:53:25 UTC
I see. Awful. I hope you'll get everything you want eventually.
throwaway919233 · 2026-10-26 02:16:11 UTC
governments do this on my foia requests.
HumblyTossed · 2026-10-25 18:33:48 UTC
The people should do something about this.
Razengan · 2026-10-25 19:18:18 UTC
Good idea! Let me open up my internet and post a comment.
degrees57 · 2026-10-25 20:19:56 UTC
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.
underlipton · 2026-10-25 18:43:25 UTC
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.
spencerflem · 2026-10-25 18:54:20 UTC
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.
leptons · 2026-10-25 18:43:37 UTC
They probably know their bad cops are going to end up costing them at least $2.5mil in fines and settlements.
sleepybrett · 2026-10-25 19:35:29 UTC
i was going to say, fundraising for the eventual civil suit.
phendrenad2 · 2026-10-25 18:43:57 UTC
If a hyper-left-leaning place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?
fn-mote · 2026-10-25 19:09:53 UTC
Just the police department? Seems like the politicians are complicit. That’s a problem that voting can fix.
ghusto · 2026-10-25 19:16:42 UTC
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.
Comments
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.
I have paid a small five-figure sum defending myself against various contempt of cop charges (multiple alleged violations over the years); my last arrest was for 0.009 grams [†] of marijuana (literally a flake of potleaf), wherein my Texas defense attorney [0] laid it out clearly: "if the marijuana laws in Texas changed, *I'd be out of the job..!" (boo hoo).
[†] same Class B Misdemeanor for all possession between 0-1.9999 ounces
[0] former Travis County prosecutor, of course; at the time, this should not even have resulted in an arrest ("arrest and release" was the county policy), but Rollingwood gonna Rollingwood (the wealthiest suburb of Austin)
Also, there are many ways to simplify review and redaction processes such that it doesn't cost millions of dollars.
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.
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
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.
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.
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.
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
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?
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
It cost them over $31,000 to fight over a few minor emails because the district business adminstrator was mildly embarrassed by them.
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.
> https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/anonymous-police-id-num...
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.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.
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.