SPD Is Still Delaying Public Disclosure by "Grouping" Records Requests, In Defiance of 2023 Settlement

The agreement, with the Seattle Times, says SPD can no longer delay requests for documents by lumping multiple requests into a single years-long queue.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department informed PubliCola last week that it will be "grouping" all 12 of PubliCola's twelve open, but unrelated, public records requests into a single request and answering each of them in chronological order, rather than working on more than one of our requests at one time, which had been standard practice. All of our other requests have been pushed out, "as a placeholder date," until December 31, 2025.

According to the form response SPD's public disclosure office attached to all of our outstanding requests, the office can use its "discretion to group multiple requests received from the same requester or similar requests from multiple requesters and to process the requests together as a group."

The effect of this decision will be to slow down our requests, placing the most recent ones at the back of a very long queue—discouraging PubliCola from filing additional requests and giving SPD an incentive to hold requests open longer than necessary, further delaying access to public information. We may finally get records we asked for months or years in the past, but requests we filed this month won't see the light of day until every other request we've ever filed is complete.

SPD's decision to group all our requests into a single pile is a clear violation of an agreement reached with the Seattle Times last year, which applies to all records requests, not just the Times'. Under that agreement, SPD agreed that it would not lump requests together if they are more than eight weeks apart. Our open requests do include three sets of requests that are within eight weeks of each other, plus six that are not; the requests span more than two years, October 2022 to November 2024.

According to the settlement with the Times—which the paper covered under the headline, "SPD agrees to improve public disclosure"—the city agreed that the "Seattle Police Department (SPD) will modify its [grouping policy] to preclude administrative grouping of requests that are submitted by the same requester more than eight (8) weeks apart from each other." Prior to the settlement, the Times reported, police would "at times delay releasing records for years, well beyond the period of time it actually took to process a given request"—precisely the problem PubliCola is facing now.

SPD's public disclosure officer did give us the opportunity re-order the 12 requests, but did not agree to work on more than one of them at a time.

In a statement, an SPD spokesman said SPD groups requests like PubliCola's in order to "allocate resources efficiently and fairly, to provide fullest assistance to all requestors, and to process requests in a manner that allows the greatest number of requests from the greatest number of requestors to be processed, without prioritizing or deprioritizing any one requestor."

SPD has "more than quadrupled the size of the public disclosure unit since 2016," the spokesman said, but there is still a backlog of almost 4,000 requests. SPD has used this backlog as a reason for delays for many years, and has appended a note about the backlog to its form response to records requests since at least 2018. In any case, SPD is required to follow the law, and abide by legally binding settlement agreements, regardless of workload.

The "grouping" policy, adopted under former mayor Ed Murray, was supposedly designed to reduce delays for public records requesters by allowing public disclosure staff to work on requests from more people at once. In practice, it leads to delays so long that the information is often outdated, sometimes by years, by the time it shows up in a reporter's inbox.

We have questions out to the Seattle City Attorney's Office, which signed the agreement with the Seattle Times, and will update this post if we hear back.

Getting information from SPD through official channels, never easy, became extraordinarily difficult in recent years. Under its former director John O'Neil, SPD's communications office routinely responded to simple questions and requests for information by telling PubliCola to file a records request—a departure from past practice that has made it impossible, practically speaking, to get things like police reports and 911 calls in a timely fashion.

The SPD spokesman said the media relations office will do its best to answer questions in the future, and there have been noticeable improvements. But that doesn't address the potentially years-long waits we currently face for our outstanding requests, a pile that has continued to grow because our reporting hasn’t stopped just because the department has told us, in effect, that filing records requests is pointless.

SPD’s delay tactics have had real consequences, though. Many of our requests have become significantly less timely over the months or years PubliCola has spent waiting for records. These include requests for information about former police chief Adrian Diaz' alleged use of his security detail to run personal errands and take him to the Portland Airport so he could fly to a Huskies game in Houston; requests related to body camera analysis; requests for information about the killing of 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave in January 2023; and requests for information about Daniel Auderer, the police union leader caught on tape laughing about Kandula's death.

In the interest of expediting our outstanding requests, PubliCola has closed some of the requests that are no longer timely, like a request for information about parking enforcement officers we filed in June 2022. While we don't see much point in having SPD produce records on an issue that is no longer newsworthy, our decision in itself illustrates the problem with letting the police sit on public records for months or years. The public deserves to know what the city's police department is doing with their tax dollars in a timely fashion, not years after the fact—but SPD has designed its policies to delay providing that information for as long as possible.