Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy.
How much does it cost to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?
If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.
In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about police officer Justin Peckels, which focused on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.
The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
“Once the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,” the letter from the department’s public records division read. “If the actual cost of processing your request exceeds the amount you have paid the City, you will be required to pay the difference before the City will provide the records you have requested.”
Peckels’s file is either the largest in the world, or city officials have intentionally maintained their databases in such a way as to ensure fulfilling public records requests is prohibitively expensive. The city’s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn’t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all records of all city employees, past and present.
By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene’s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.
This goes far beyond incompetence. It’s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous — and cost prohibitive — to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely.
Normally, agencies are required to search the specific custodians most likely to possess responsive records, not every groundskeeper or clerk on the city payroll. If the city were acting in good faith, officials would have asked Double Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record-holders, not take it upon themselves to cast a citywide dragnet as its first step.
What makes Eugene’s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can’t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city’s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents.
Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department’s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome.
For small newsrooms, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry.
Troublingly, Eugene’s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.
In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million for records about the DEA’s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash.
The list goes on and on.
Luckily, records requesters seeking federal documents have a defense against these capricious invoices. Recent FOIA amendments aim to ensure if an agency misses its response deadlines, it can’t charge most fees.
At the local level, however, these protections disintegrate. While Oregon grants agencies the discretion to reduce fees when the disclosure would benefit the public, agencies routinely ignore these provisions.
For small newsrooms like Double Sided Media, a $2.5 million invoice is effectively a gag order that was never actually about covering costs, but bullying the requester to drop their inquiry (all while Eugene Police Department launches its own “press” initiative to document its policing). It also sets the precedent for using this chilling tactic on any journalist or watchdog as it sees fit.
Double Sided Media is rightly appealing the fee estimate, and it should prevail. But cities like Eugene will continue these efforts unless lawmakers across the country force agencies to adopt fee caps, mandate public-interest fee waivers for journalists, and require agencies to procure software that allows them to respond to records requests in an efficient and timely manner.
Until then, police departments will likely continue to issue multimillion-dollar ransoms for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know into another avenue for police to operate with impunity.