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<\/p>\nLauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation\u2019s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n How much does it cost<\/span> to get more information about a cop who punched someone in the face?<\/p>\n If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you\u2019d be wrong \u2014 at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.<\/p>\n In August, the local news outlet Double Sided Media<\/a> 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<\/a> during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed<\/a> searching for records and processing the request would take at least<\/em> 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<\/a>, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)<\/p>\n \u201cOnce the City receives payment of $2,484,599.04 staff will continue processing your request,\u201d the letter from the department\u2019s public records division read. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Peckels\u2019s 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\u2019s response points, at a minimum, to the latter. It justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it couldn\u2019t narrow the custodians whose records it would need to search, despite the targeted nature of the request, and maintained it must search all<\/em> records of all<\/em> city employees, past and present.<\/p>\n By that logic, if someone ever worked in Eugene\u2019s parks and recreation department, their records could contain responsive information about police misconduct, and must be manually pulled and reviewed, one by one.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This goes far beyond incompetence. It\u2019s an intentional effort to make a response artificially voluminous \u2014 and cost prohibitive \u2014 to intimidate the journalist into dropping it entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What makes Eugene\u2019s money-grab particularly galling is its technology double standard. While it apparently can\u2019t invest in efficient search software, the police department recently signed a two-year $342,000<\/a> contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock<\/a> automated license plate readers. This project was so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue<\/a> the city for records about how the cameras were being used and demonstrates, among other inclinations, the city\u2019s eagerness to employ sophisticated software to deploy against residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet that technological sophistication disappears as soon as a journalist requests public records about the department\u2019s internal accountability process, and simple keyword searches are suddenly cumbersome.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Troublingly, Eugene\u2019s $2.5 million bill is not an anomaly.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The same year, the Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would cost $1.46 million<\/a> for records about the DEA\u2019s role in the search and capture of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzman.<\/p>\n In 2019, the Army tried to charge $300,000 to release military base water test results<\/a> for the presence of toxic chemicals. The Army agreed to waive the exorbitant fee after facing intense backlash.\u00a0<\/p>\n The list goes on and on<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Screenshot-2026-10-01-at-2.18.31-PM.png?fit=2542%2C840\")
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