alt Hacker NewsOregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
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> 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
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...
Freedom of Information Act in the UK means I make a request, and I get the information I asked for within 30 days. No excuses, no nonsense "fees".
Just what in the hell is happening in the USA?
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.
(15 million hours = over 1700 years)
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.
Before I clicked through I assumed this would be about press attempts to get use-of-force records confirmed for a Portland city council candidate who's also a cop: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/anonymous-police-id-num...
It isn't, so it's just normal Oregon behavior to have multiple news stories about police departments stonewalling transparency laws.
Transparency and knowing what the po-po are up to costs a fortune now.
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.
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.
There are very few things that are as important as excising this insidious organized criminal syndicate we erroneously call the justice system.
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.
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.
(Source - https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/justice/2026/10/...)
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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.”
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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.)
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Charitably, Justin Peckels’ supervisory bandwidth appears to be roughly 12x that of another officer.
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.
I've been seeing more FOIA request costs going up, justice for those wealthy enough to pay for it, as per usual!
We need AI powered FOIA request responses. All of these manual process are prone to abuse.
It should be called Pay for Information Act
They probably know their bad cops are going to end up costing them at least $2.5mil in fines and settlements.
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.
If a decent, empathy-forward place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?
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.
How much should we charge the fuckers for keeping records on our entire lives?
If a hyper-left-leaning place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?
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.