Report Claims a Third of FOIA Requests To the NYPD Go Unanswered 65
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."
FOIL (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, there are no FIOA requests answered by any New York government office since the equivalent state law is abbreviated FOIL.
Re:Good or Bad (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Good or Bad (Score:4, Informative)