Seattle Police Records Requests

Publicola editor Erica C. Barnett, an independent journalist focused on Seattle city government, has run up against blatant corruption in the Seattle Police Department:

Erica C. Barnett on 2025-09-17:

The Seattle Police Department has informed me that they will not follow the policy they agreed to in a settlement with the Seattle Times on public disclosure when dealing with my records requests. Instead, they are "grouping" all of my requests and responding to them, in full, one at a time.

As the Seattle Times' own coverage made clear, their understanding and belief was that SPD is no longer allowed to group requests that are more than two months apart. After months and months of not bothering, I filed another request, noting this policy. They told me to fuck off.

We have a very good Public Disclosure Act in the state of Washington. SPD has ginned up a way to violate the law, which both violates the intent and letter of the PDA and discourages public records requests, which SPD's communications office often directs me to file instead of answering questions.

...

The agreement with the Times says SPD won't group requests more than 2 months apart. My most recent request was more than 9 months ago. SPD said they don't care and lumped it in with all my other requests. I do not expect them to ever respond to most of these; they've made their refusal clear.

The details of that settlement can be found here: Settlement Agreement 2023-07-22. Apparently the Seattle Times sued them again in 2025 for SPD not upholding their side of the settlement.

It bothers me how prevalent these kinds of low-level unethical behaviors are. Especially at the city level. In the past I thought they'd be less frequent since the stakes are lower than state or federal government. I guess people are gonna be people — incapable of or unwilling to impersonally inhabit their role, and vindictive.