freedom of information request questions

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For anyone who knows how many hours do they usually charge to search email accounts?

I'd like to find out what some metro employees may have said concerning the carry of my orange AK the other day.

I filed a request for public info last week. Todaythey said it would cost 1900 hours to search for my name in the email accounts. I didn't ask how much it would cost, but I assume it would run about $30,000.

They are currently trying to find the phone calls I made to dispatch.

Hopefully, the complaint report will be ready to pickup next week.

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Hey, this sounds like they are giving you the run around!

Also, did you request a copy of the dispatch log? That will be the complete log of the day or shift that your incident happened on ... this cuts out the "searching for phone call records" crap ... as for the phone calls, unless they record those, which some probably do not, you still have the one side of the conversation from the dash board camera footage which you already have.

As for the emails, read this guys emails and letters (you don't need to go into the court docs and filings yet) and you will see that he requests copies of documents to be delivered to a local officeunder FOIA so that he can peruse them to determine which pages he needs copies of ... this way, he doesn't incur the costs of searches and such ... simply request a bulk printout of specific dates or ranges of dates. They will make a hard copy of this information at some point for storage, so you do not incur that cost yourself, then you are back to up to $1.00 per page, but this rate should be posted somewhere ... look in the court clerk's office or similar.

Keep being a nice, reasonable young man and you will accomplish more than if you present a confrontational attitude. You also might contact the first ranger and record the conversation ... I can see something like, "Man, was I such a really scarey guy?" Be smooth and get him to tell you things that you want to know without asking outright and pointblank.

Be sure to get email addresses of the folks you are dealing with in the gov't offices and ask to conduct this through email correspondence ... that gives you a printed record of all transactions and date/time stamps.

The system is supposed to work for you not against you, but sometimes you have to circle around to get where you want to go so you don't tip your hand too early.

Good luck and keep at it!

imported post

kwikrnu wrote:

For anyone who knows how many hours do they usually charge to search email accounts?

I'd like to find out what some metro employees may have said concerning the carry of my orange AK the other day.

I filed a request for public info last week. Today they said it would cost 1900 hours to search for my name in the email accounts. I didn't ask how much it would cost, but I assume it would run about $30,000.

They are currently trying to find the phone calls I made to dispatch.

Hopefully, the complaint report will be ready to pickup next week.

Click to expand...

1900 HOURS!!?!?!!!?!?!?!?!?

That sounds completley unreasonable and unlikely.

It is a full-text search, not placing all of the department's emails in front of some people to read.

imported post

tekshogun wrote:

kwikrnu wrote:

For anyone who knows how many hours do they usually charge to search email accounts?

I'd like to find out what some metro employees may have said concerning the carry of my orange AK the other day.

I filed a request for public info last week. Todaythey said it would cost 1900 hours to search for my name in the email accounts. I didn't ask how much it would cost, but I assume it would run about $30,000.

They are currently trying to find the phone calls I made to dispatch.

Hopefully, the complaint report will be ready to pickup next week.

Click to expand...

1900 HOURS!!?!?!!!?!?!?!?!?

That sounds completley unreasonable and unlikely.

It is a full-text search, not placing all of the department's emails in front of some people to read.

Click to expand...

I'm just relating what the lady told me. She said it would take 1900 hours and wanted to know if I wanted to approve that. At a minimum I figured it would cost $20K and a max of about $40K, so I told her not do do it on the phone. Ican think of better things to blow $20K on if I had that much to blow.

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I know you're relaying what you were informed, however, I wear several hats regarding technology where I work and one of those hats is a database-administrator. I know what it's like to look for one thing out of hundreds of millions of records and it isn't that difficult.

I don't know what email system they are using, but I think a quote of 1900 hours was meant to discourage you. I could be wrong, but let's say they imported all of this information into a database:

SELECT email_datetime_sent, email_sender, email_receiver, email_subject, email_body FROM Email_Table WHERE email_body CONTAINS 'name' OR email_subject CONTAINS 'name' SORT BY email_datetime_sent asc;