Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop

A Eugene-based publication requested records about a cop accused of misconduct. The city slapped it with a prohibitive fee.

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........

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