All Emily Moyer wanted was to keep the man she loved alive. In April 2023, she sent a public records request to the Spokane Police Department, armed only with a laptop, a deadline, and a law that, in theory, guaranteed her access to government documents. Before her fiancé’s trial in August, she required disciplinary files on the officers involved in his case. Instead, she received silence, a delay, and incomplete records, which were delivered on September 29th, almost a month after he had already received a sixteen-year sentence. The documents revealed actual issues, such as officers with disciplinary records and credibility issues that could have been relevant in court. However, it was already too late. “It really does me no good now,” she remarked.
Her tale is not unique. It is worthwhile to pay attention to because of this. Advocacy groups, journalists, and regular citizens are becoming more and more unwilling to overlook the discrepancy between what public records laws promise and what agencies actually deliver across the nation. The majority of government information, including inspection records, court documents, disciplinary files, and internal communications, is ostensibly accessible to the public in every state and the federal government. In reality, agencies can charge exorbitant fees, redact, delay, or even completely disregard requests. Often, the last thing an agency produces quickly is the inspection records that the public is legally entitled to view.
In short, delays are becoming worse rather than better, according to David Cuillier, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Freedom of Information Project. Over the last ten years, the average federal response time has nearly doubled. In 2022, cities like Spokane in Washington state, which was once thought to be a national model for records access, took an average of one full month of business days to fulfill a single request; Seattle took almost twice as long. It took more than four months for InvestigateWest to receive a basic log of its own records requests from Spokane. Requesting the list of items that people had requested was a records request in and of itself, and it vanished into the same malfunctioning system.
Volume and the complex politics that underlie it are some of the issues. Over the past ten years, requests for records have increased dramatically due to a variety of factors, including partisan activism and data brokers who profit from accident reports. Last year, a single LexisNexis employee in Atlanta paid Portland over $110,000 after submitting over 9,000 records requests. In the meantime, the public records system’s intended audience—journalists and citizen advocates—becomes entangled in the same backlog and frequently lacks the means to contest court delays or pay exorbitant fees. At one point, Portland requested $1,800 from a news organization to gain access to a week’s worth of mayoral correspondence. To acquire documents regarding a police departure, a Salem newspaper had to raise more than $4,200 through crowdfunding.
This is more difficult to decipher because lawmakers have frequently made the system worse rather than better. There are currently over 650 exemptions under Washington state’s public records law, and that number increases by about a dozen every legislative session. In isolation, a few of those exceptions make sense. However, the overall impact on records clerks is astounding. A 2020 law mandated that the month and year of a public employee’s birthday be redacted, but not the day. This meant that clerks couldn’t just remove a column; instead, they had to convert spreadsheets to PDFs and manually create tiny black boxes for hundreds of entries, row by row. A second exemption mandated that agencies notify each employee listed in a personnel record and allow them to contest the release in court. As a result, the same document can be requested by a journalist, a data broker, or an ordinary citizen, and they will all receive three different versions that have been redacted in three different ways, each of which needs a separate legal review.
Some people are resisting in a quiet, obstinate, and sometimes highly visible manner. For years, groups like Public Justice have fought against court secrecy and unsealed documents that businesses used to conceal information about hazardous products. In one instance, the manufacturer of the rifle had been aware of the flaw for decades, but they concealed the evidence in sealed court documents. The rifle fired without a trigger pull. The Prison Policy Initiative has created comprehensive guides to assist advocates and incarcerated individuals in navigating requests for criminal justice system data from public records. The National Freedom of Information Coalition encourages attorneys general to uphold access laws and monitors state-level compliance. These fights aren’t glamorous. They don’t follow trends. However, they are important.
Observing all of this makes it difficult not to feel as though the system has subtly strayed from its intended goal. The foundation of public records laws is the notion that public visibility is necessary for government accountability and that people have a right to see how institutions are acting, particularly when those institutions have authority over their lives. That accountability vanishes when inspection records remain concealed, court records remain sealed, and agencies wait until trials are finished and deadlines have passed before fulfilling requests. Additionally, there is a perception that far too many agencies have begun to view transparency as a manageable inconvenience rather than a fundamental duty.
Just across the river from Portland, Vancouver, Washington, finished Within eight days, InvestigateWest made two requests for records. No costs, no hold-ups. They simply staffed the function appropriately and operated under the presumption that public records belong to the public; their city attorney did not provide a magic formula. “Vancouver puts up quite a lot of resources towards getting these responded to in a timely fashion,” he stated. It turns out that sometimes the only true response is the unattractive one. Use the funds. Employ the individuals. Since transparency is a necessary component of the work, treat it as such.
