Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
theintercept.com522 points by tdeck 3 days ago
522 points by tdeck 3 days ago
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.
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.
It can be both, one situation to the next.
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.
How about "failing to be rich enough to hire enough staff for all the FOIA requests that are made"?
"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.
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