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Report Claims a Third of FOIA Requests To the NYPD Go Unanswered
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who shared a Pulitzer last year as part of the Associated Press team covering the NYPD's surveillance activity, have summed it up perfectly: The NYPD doesn't answer document requests. "For the most part, they don't respond," Apuzzo told the Huffington Post. 'Even the NSA responds.' It's not just reporters who've noticed. New York City Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio gave the police department a failing grade in an April report based on its dismal response rate to Freedom of Information requests. By de Blasio's analysis, nearly a third of requests submitted to NYPD go unanswered."
LAPD and NYPD are locked in an epic struggle to see which department can be a bigger waste of taxpayer money.
I wonder how many of their 911 emergency calls go unanswered?
Should read:
"NYPD ignores the law"
since they're required to respond to these requests.
I'm sorry - my brain parsed that as "the Minority Report"...
Technically, there are no FIOA requests answered by any New York government office since the equivalent state law is abbreviated FOIL.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
What is printed above the information desk of the NYPD
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is replying optional? Or is there some sort of requirement?
The requests that go unanswered are either badly written (you know what I mean: smiley faces, horrible grammer, bad spelling, etc.) or would involve the department turning over information that would be questionable or even criminal in nature.
I think you misunderstand -- it's not that 1/3 don't get the information they're asking for... it's that they're unanswered. In other words, no "thank you for submitting your request X - it has tracking item Y" or "Your request has been examined by Officer X and has been deemed to be improperly submitted. Please follow the guidelines as made available here:" or "Thank you for your request. It has been examined, and we have determined that the information requested is not of a type made available by this department through FOIA requests." It doesn't take much of a tracking system to handle this; there are many out there that could do the job.
More likely it's a case of the department not being structured to actually handle FOIA requests, which means the ones that ARE answered are ones where the person who handles the inbox actually knows who to hand the request off to -- and no item tracking system is in place at all. Should be pretty easy to fix, if tehre's any incentive to do so (aside from it being illegal not to).
Refusals or demands for clarification qualify as 'answers'. Here, one third just disappear into a void, neither fulfilled nor denied.
Is replying optional? Or is there some sort of requirement?
You know the score, pal! If you're not a cop, you're "little people."
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
File 13, the circular file.
Sent to recycling before processing.
Why are you surprised?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Even if that were so, the NYPD should answer those requests, if only to say that they can't honor them.
Exactly if they pretend it was lost in the mail, they are no longer required to answer anything. My real thought on the matter is that they are simply incompetent. They have been striving for that for a long time now. Maybe the cops on the beat need to where some body cams, this way there would be less to question.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's time to bare them if they do. NYPD is pretty famous for stonewalling on certain issues. It's time that wall fell on a few of them.
Until it is either illegal for "shoot first, as questions maybe later, probably never" policy - OR - it's legal for non-cops to use the same policy when being approached by a police officer, then anything they say that doesn't involve admitting rape and murder is an out-right lie anyway.
Not to mention you can't slander a reputation when that reputation is already to murder and rape people.
If they didn't want that image, I'd imagine they would put a tiny bit more effort into not murdering and raping people. Seems perfectly legit to me.
I didn't think politicians were allowed on slashdot? An AC politician is an oxy moron....
1/3rd would be a minority, and one (very friendly) source says 1/3rd go unanswered. Everyone else thinks the percentage is larger - by some reckonings a majority may actually go unanswered.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
In New Hampshire, our state equivalent to FOIA, RSA 91-A, requires that a government entity respond within 5 days to a right-to-know request or they can be hauled into court. RSA 91-A:4, IV. They don't have to provide the information within 5 days, but they at least have to respond saying they have received the request and either say how long it will take to comply with the request, or explain---under a very short list of enumerated exemptions in RSA 91-A:5---why the request is being denied. Denials themselves can of course be appealed. RSA 91-A:7. And RSA 91-A:8 authorizes the courts to award attorneys fees to the complainant if they're successful in demonstrating the agency violated the right-to-know law. Wilful violations by individual bureaucrats can even render them personally liable for all the court costs. RSA 91-A:8, IV.
New York's FOIA law doesn't have remedies similar to this?
Liberty in your lifetime
He works at the NYPD, but since he's too busy cleaning his PC with MyCleanPC, he keeps deleting FOIA requests instead of answering them. Oops.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Of course we hope that staffing is the issue, but as the guy once said "Never assume". Considering that NYPD had policies like Stop&Frisk, it could very well be that they have people holding offices that just don't give a shit about the law. That lack of regard tends to trickle down to the people they hire.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not answering is illegal. It does not matter if it's 1/2, 1/3, or 1/100 requests it is still against the law. Now if NY accepted 2/3ds of a fine as full payment or accepted 2/3rds of your taxes as payment in full maybe they would have some barter room.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I just skimmed New York's statue is similar. New York just ignores the law http://www.ojjpac.org/sanctuary.asp .
They don't follow laws, they don't try to change laws that they think should be changed, they just ignore them.
The majority of New York voters support ignoring the law.
The person filing the request must specify which record they want. So "Where is Elvis hiding" isn't a FOI request.
"Please provide the arrest report for when Elvis Presley was arrested on Oct. 18, 1956" is a FOI request.
NYPD is the single most corrupt police department in the united states, they make the LAPD look like honest angels.
If they were not corrupt they would happily abide by the law and answer these. What are they hiding? It has to be illegal and unethical activities.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> There's probably also a constitutional argument to be made in the case of the IIRIRA. Practically every policy the Federal
> Government tries to force on the states now is an unconstitutional overreach of their explicitly enumerated powers.
Most are unconstitutional overreach. The Constitution grants only ~18 powers to the federal government.
Regulating immigration happens to be one thing the federal government can and arguably must do. (Consider the effect of article IV otherwise).
One of the enumerated powers is "To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization". Naturalization means:
1) to confer upon (an alien) the rights and privileges of a citizen. [such as a driver's license]
2) to introduce or adopt (foreign practices, words, etc.) into a country or into general use
So two thirds DO get answered? That seems to indicate that "for the most part" they DO respond. By law, three thirds should get answered, but it doesn't seem fair to say "they don't respond."
The Feds can regulate immigration, but since general police power isn't an enumerated power, they can't actually police immigrants. In other words, the Feds can define "citizen," "permanent resident," &c., and they can grant privileges to each of these terms based on whatever criteria they come up with, but they don't actually have the constitutional power to send enforcers into the States and apprehend so-called "illegal" immigrants. The most they can do is deny such people recognition as U.S. citizens and the privileges that entails.
And of course the States are free to grant whatever privileges they wish to their inhabitants regardless of what the Feds call such people. If a State wants to allow non-citizens to have drivers licenses (the Feds have no jurisdiction at all over driver licensing), legal "residency" for State- or local-level purposes, &c., they can.
Liberty in your lifetime