By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office denied PubliCola’s request to consider nine outstanding records requests in four batches, as a settlement agreement between the department and the Seattle Times requires, telling us that they are following a rule put in place under former mayor Ed Murray that allowed SPD to “group” all records requests from a single media outlet or individual into a single mega-request and respond to each request one at a time.

In 2023, the city settled the Seattle Times’ lawsuit over this practice, which unreasonably delays access to public information, by agreeing to refrain from grouping requests made more than eight weeks apart. Although the agreement did not entirely stop SPD from grouping (and thereby delaying) records requests, it was supposed to rein in the police department’s liberal use of this delaying tactic.

SPD did not say why they suddenly decided to group our requests, most of which SPD has claimed to be working on for months, and in some cases well over a year. SPD had already provided disclosure dates for all but one of our nine requests (and three we closed because we’ve been waiting so long that they’re no longer timely; now, SPD has canceled all of those dates and assigned a “placeholder” disclosure date of December 31, 2025 to all but one of our requests.

SPD’s decision to group our requests means that records that we were supposed to receive, under SPD’s previous disclosure schedule, in the next couple of months have now been arbitrarily pushed out to a date more than a year in the future. Under the old schedule, we were supposed to receive records on three requests this month, one request in January, four in February, one in March, one in April, and two in May. Now, under a best-case scenario, we’ll get the first installment on a single request we made last April at the end of February, with all the others pushed out indefinitely.

This delay in providing access to public records directly contradicts the terms of the city’s settlement, and creates an obstruction to public access to public information. We filed a records request today to find out how many other media outlets and members of the public have been affected by this policy over the past year. Since our latest request has to get in line behind all the others, dating back to early 2023, it will likely be a long, long time before we have our answer.