Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
- ID
- 39371
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 26 Oct 2026, 2:04 AM
- Fetched
- 26 Oct 2026, 6:11 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://theintercept.com/2026/10/01/oregon-police-misconduct-public-records-cost-fee/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 26 Oct 2026, 6:11 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersdatabase_learners
What happened
Double Sided Media, a Eugene, Oregon outlet, requested public records on police officer Justin Peckels covering alleged misconduct from 2018 to 2026; the city quoted $2,484,599.04, claiming at least 44,816 hours of staff search time. A parallel request for records on former officer Eric Klinko came in at $195,869.52, putting the combined bill near $2.7 million. The department said it could not narrow which custodians' records would need to be searched.
Why it matters
The concrete number here is 44,816 staff hours to find one officer's records — that is a data-architecture failure, not a labor estimate. If you build or advise on records systems for any agency or regulated organisation, the lesson is to index by entity (officer, case, date range) at write time, because a schema that only supports full-corpus scans turns every disclosure request into a cost estimate that doubles as a refusal. This is US local-government news with no direct Malaysian policy or funding impact; treat it as a design cautionary tale, not a local story.
Discussion angle
Is 'cost of search' a legitimate fee or a design choice? Walk through what per-entity indexing would have done to that 44,816-hour estimate, and ask which records systems the group has seen where the schema itself blocks a reasonable query.