County Sheriff’s Office Faces Public Records Request for Every Document It Has
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Transparency advocate says man’s request for 238 years of documents damages ‘the cause of open government.’
It’s not uncommon for public records requests made by members of the media, public interest groups or ordinary citizens to frustrate local governments.
Some of those requests might expose potentially embarrassing information. In other instances, resource-strapped local governments might get overwhelmed when trying to respond to such requests to comply with public records statutes.
While local governments across the nation routinely respond to countless public records requests without much fanfare, when conflicts do develop, they can manifest themselves in various ways, including litigation.
Earlier this month in Seattle, the city’s police department signaled it might back away from its plans to equip its officers with body cameras due to an anonymous computer programmer’s requests for information on the videos that the department said it wasn’t equipped to deal with.
And just to the north in Snohomish County, local officials there are dealing with a very different type of public records request predicament. An anonymous man recently requested every document that the sheriff’s department has in its possession.
“I hereby request copies, in whatever form available, of each and every document in your agency's possession of any and every kind whatsoever without exception or limitation except as provided by narrow exception of law,” he wrote, according to The Herald in Everett. “The date range that this request relates to, encompasses or covers begins at July 4th, 1776, and runs until today's date, November 18th, 2014.”
The county prosecutor told Seattle’s KOMO-TV that processing the request will take decades. The anonymous man, going by the name Publius Publicus, told the television station that “he wants to create an indexable, online database of all the documents with appropriate redactions so the public can access it for free, which in his mind will free up county workers from fulfilling public disclosure requests like his.”
The president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, which advocates for greater public access to government information, told The Herald that the man’s request was “damaging to the cause of open government.”
But the Snohomish County prosecutor’s office contends that the man’s request is likely legally valid and has advised employees to save every document they have, including those that would be routinely discarded, including recordings of inmate phone calls at the county jail, the newspaper reported.
The county prosecutor told KOMO-TV that he’d like a legislative change that would allow a judge to decide whether such a massive records request is appropriate.
"I think this really just needs a fairly minor tweak that can save the taxpayers major money," Mark Roe, the prosecutor, told the television station.
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