Police Open Records Improvements? Not!

February 11, 2025 7:20 am

Whew, its gotten so much more worse than I had realized, 6 – 8 weeks to get information that used to be obtained in 10 minutes or less.

TLDR

Police department open records requests that never even had to be made or could take as little as 10 minutes now take 6-8 weeks. And the police department no longer encourages active property management.

BACKGROUND

Pull up to my rocking chair and grab my shawl, I got a story to tell. It used to be that the police department encouraged property owners to be proactive and actively manage their properties. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, and sometimes they didn’t try too hard, but they at least made of show of it.

My recent experience of trying to get the police calls to a certain property address that I help run is just mind blowing. A neighbor is complaining that there are too many police calls and I wanted to find out how many there were over the last three years, cuz I believe the calls are significantly less and quite minor.

In the past, there were several ways to get such information:

a captain or lieutenant or even sergeant might just give you that information via email if you asked
you could go downtown to the Records window in the basement of the City-County Building and hand them address, wait 3-8 minutes for them to print the list and rarely they might redact something and then they hand you the list
you could just ask an alder to get them for you
you could email the records department and they would email them back you, usually within a day or two

Well, things have changed!

RECENT EXPERIENCE

It’s been a year or two since I did an open records request for police records. Partially because when I was chairing the Public Safety Review Committee when I asked for information Chief Shon Barnes would always tell me I had to do an open records requests. I also noticed that captains wouldn’t give out the number of police calls to properties and said I had to do an open records request even when they were holding the information in their hand or looking at it on the computer. The nice ones would at least verbally share the information.

Another issue I was running into was that the records department would only do one request at a time, in the order they were received and if I had a request that took longer, the shorter requests would wait in the queue until the longer request was filled. And it was starting to take weeks or months. At that time, I thought the process was slow and I was frustrated that by the time you got the information you requested, it was too late to take action. So I kinda stopped using that as a tool. And, I stopped blogging, got kicked off the Public Safety Review Committee after my first 3 year term and just got very busy with work, Occupy and life.

So, imagine my surprise when I tried to get the aforementioned list of calls to a property and I hit a brick wall, hard. Remember, I’m talking the list that took less than 10 minutes if you went to the City-County Building or you could just ask for it and you had in in 24-48 hours.

Well, I went to look up how to do an open records request through MPD and the email address was gone. Instead, there was the Public Records Request Center. In order to submit a request, I had to create an account and log in. And when I submitted my request I got an email letting me know they received the request and that “Processing time is based on volume and staffing.”

That was on January 30th. I went on vacation and I thought by the time I got back I’d have the information and deal with neighbor. That was almost 2 weeks ago. Remember, this is the information that was previously available with a wait of 10 minutes to 48 hours.

So, I made three inquiries.

Captain where the property is located. I actually emailed them on January 30th as well to find out if they were seeing increased activities or had concerns. Spoiler alert – they didn’t have (m)any concerns. They also said “I had a chance to look at our calls for service over the past few months . . . ” which made my blood boil. On February 5th I emailed again and asked “Any idea how long a simple records check is taking these days? Used to be property owners could get these reports quite quickly.” To which they replied “I am not sure on the exact time frame but I know our records request time has improved, with some systems improvements, so hopefully not too long. If it gets to be a long wait, let me know and I can inquire on the status with records.” Ok. Improvements?
An Alder. So I was ranting about this to an alder and asked if something had changed. or if they had gotten complaints about how slow this was. I asked if you could still go to the window and the alder thought you could.
The records window. Well, on Monday morning I went to the records window. After I struggled to even get there . . . another blog post . . . I asked if I could get the list. They told me I had go through the portal and they couldn’t give me the info. I asked how long it would take and she said 6 – 8 weeks.