Late last month, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department’s policy of considering no more than one public disclosure request from the same person at a time, leaving subsequent requests in an indefinite “inactive” status, violates the state Public Disclosure Act.
The policy, called “grouping,” has been allowed in Seattle since 2017, when then-mayor Ed Murray and the City Council passed legislation aimed at preventing people from using bots to file dozens or hundreds of requests at a time.
In practice, SPD has been the only city department to deploy grouping on a mass scale, allowing the police to delay or deny disclosure for years by responding to every request by the same requester, in full, before even starting on subsequent requests. The Seattle Times sued to stop the practice, secured an agreement from SPD that they wouldn’t group requests from any requester that were more than eight weeks apart, and sued again when SPD failed to abide by their agreement. (PubliCola filed a declaration in support of the Times’ position)…