The Austin Police Department is sitting on a backlog of 20,000 Public Information Requests, according to a new report from the Office of the City Auditor, and has only six employees to process the requests.
Meanwhile, there are 120 staff available to handle PIRs citywide, but they don’t touch those pertaining to APD.
It’s a situation the department has brought upon itself, advocates say. “APD has created this dichotomy – and it’s a false dichotomy – because it wants to pretend that only APD staff can manage APD records, and that is simply not true,” said Equity Action’s Kathy Mitchell. “If there are 120 PIR staff employed by the city, and they have some spare time, they should be doing this. There is no reason why APD staff should have to process PIRs. APD is part of the city.”
According to the auditor’s report, the 120 staff members field far fewer requests than APD. The audit counted 82,000 PIRs received by APD from 2018 to 2022. All other departments combined received 39,000. (That averages out to about 81 PIRs per city staff member per year, and more than 3,000 per APD staff member per year.) As a result, about a quarter of the PIRs received by APD take over a year to address.
The report notes that state law requires the city to answer PIRs in a timely manner. It recommends centralizing the PIR process, hiring more staff to process requests, and improving staff training.
It also recommends that the city create a strategy to end APD’s public information backlog. One way to accomplish this, it suggests, would be for the city to post the responses to the most frequently requested information on its website, since many of the 121,000 PIRs the city received between 2019 and 2022 asked for the same information. “Proactively identifying and posting information that may be of interest to the public may help reduce the number of PIR submitted and handled,” the report reads.
This article appears in September 1 • 2023.
